If scientific thought can fully enough represent the world around us, literature can also be moved by the same interest. Scientific and philosophical theories present themselves and come to the aid as tools for reinterpreting the world whenever literature is experienced as an instrument useful to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. Here we examine the problems raised by the second scientific revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century and the linguistic turn of a literature that tells of man in depth, in his complexity, and in his contradictions. There are also collected essays on two particularly significant writers, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, who have probed the fields of science in a relevant way and have contributed to increasing our knowledge.