Niklas Bender is substitute Professor for Romance Literatures at Trier and Tübingen University. His works focus on literature and science, comic procedures, laughter and anthropology. Recently, he published The Laughter of Art: the Contribution of the Comic to Modernist Literature.Gisèle Séginger, full professor at the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée and member of the Institut Universitaire de France, is the founder of the Centre de Recherche Littératures, Savoirs et Arts (LISAA) and director of a research program at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. She is a specialist on Flaubert, Nerval, Musset and on the relations between literature and scientific knowledge.