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At the very heart of the positivist age emerges, alien to the nebulous cloud of stories finding their inspiration in science, an unprecedented fictional sub-genre hardly defined until the present day and which we suggest should be called the “novel of the savant or thinker”. An heir to the Romansbildung, it subverts its codes in order to bring forth a problematic hero whose nostalgic, sedentary and asocial tendencies are witness to the relative incapacity of science to solve the double crisis, fictional and communitarian, of the moment. Conceived of as a drama of intelligence, this type of story furthermore shows itself to be a kind of study of epistemic conscience, its failures and blind spots. Belonging to the classical canon rather than to popular literature, its ultimate characteristic is reflexivity, whereby its writers appropriate and at the same time modify the ethos of the scientists of their time.