This dissertation examines the role of scientific elements and scientific language in the novels of the Japanese writer Abe Kobo (1924-1993). Abe is best known for the grotesque or surreal elements in his work, but his novels also contain a great deal of scientific material, including characters, plot elements, and technical language drawn from a range of scientific disciplines. I argue that by combining the scientific with the grotesque, Abe blurs the line between fiction and science, challenging our stereotypes about the order or rationality of science and the empty fantasies of fiction. Chapter one begins by surveying distinctions between science and literature in a range of aesthetic theories from the Renaissance down to Abe's own critical writing. Chapters two through four undertake close readings of three novels: Dai yon kanpyoki (Inter Ice Age 4, 1959), Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, 1964), and Mikkai (Secret Rendezvous, 1977). Following a method suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of novelistic heteroglossia, each reading identifies a number of distinct dialects or voices in the work, some scientific and some more fantastic, and each associated with a particular perspective or world view. Each reading shows how these voices divide, interact, conflict, or recombine into new hybrids; then it explores what this says about comparing and reconciling the scientific and literary perspectives that these voices represent. The conclusion that emerges from Abe's work is that we sometimes need to adjust the balance between the scientific and the literary in our language, our society, or ourselves. I relate this to Abe's criticism of the narrow rationality he called "nichijo," and to three other critical concepts: Bakhtin's ideas of authorship and "consummation;" characterizations of postmodernism by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, and others; and theories of parody advanced by Bakhtin, Jameson, and Linda Hutcheon. The final pages apply what we have learned from Abe's novels to a reading of the "Sokal hoax," a critical controversy that brings together these issues of style, parody, postmodernism, and literature versus science.