Dorrit Cohn

Dorrit Cohn (9 August 1924 – 10 March 2012) was an Austrian-born scholar of German and Comparative Literature whose work centered on the formal analysis of narrative fiction.

Life

Dorrit Cohn was born in Vienna in 1924. Her family left Austria only a few days before the Anschluss in 1938. She immigrated to the United States with her family in 1939, attending the Lycée Français in New York City. She studied physics (AB, 1945) and Comparative Literature (AM, 1946) at Radcliffe College. She started graduate work in Comparative Literature at Yale and resumed it after an 11-year hiatus, earning a Ph.D. in German from Stanford. Her dissertation (basis of her 1966 book) was on Hermann Broch's 1930-32 novel '' Die Schlafwandler''. She taught at Indiana University from 1964 before moving to Harvard in June 1971, where (as one of the first women professors with tenure) she taught Comparative and German Literature as the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature.

She retired in 1995, and her final years were spent in Durham, North Carolina.

Work

Dorrit Cohn's main work was in narratology. Her most prominent work, ''Transparent Minds'' (1978), studies how characters' consciousnesses are reflected in fiction in a variety of first- and third-person works, mostly from the 19th-century Realist and 20th-century Modernist traditions. Her work in this area was closely related to that of Gérard Genette and Franz Stanzel, with both of whom she had productive exchanges about the best way to analyze how consciousness is presented in fiction.

Toward the end of her life she became very interested in the formal differences between fictional and non-fictional narratives; her 1999 book ''The Distinction of Fiction'' treats works by Freud and Proust, the fictional biography ''Marbot'' by Wolfgang Hildesheimer (who had also written a best-selling biography of Mozart), Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and historical novels by Stendhal and Tolstoy. The book won the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature Studies.

In addition to the two books, she published many articles on works of fiction in German and other languages. She also had an abiding interest in Freud and Freudian interpretation.

Selected bibliography

* "K Enters The Castle: On the Change of Person in Kafka's Manuscript." ''Euphorion'' 62 (1968): 28–45.
* "Kleist's 'Marquise von O...': The Problem of Knowledge." ''Monatshefte'' 67 (1975): 129–44.
* ''Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction'' (Princeton University Press, 1978)
* "The Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel's ''Theorie des Erzählens''." ''Poetics Today'' 2 (1981): 157–82.
* (with Gerard Genette). "Nouveaux nouveaux discours du récit." ''Poétique'' 61 (1985): 101–09. ommentary on Genette's ''Nouveaux discours du récit'' with Genette's response* "Wilhelm Meister's dream: reading Goethe with Freud." ''German Quarterly'' 62 (1989): 459–72.
* "''Ein eigentlich träumerischer Doppelsinn'': telling timelessness in ''Der Zauberberg''." ''Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift'' 44 (1994): 425–39.
* ''The Distinction of Fiction'' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

References

Obituary, Harvard Gazette, March 2012

Obituary, Boston Globe, 20 March 2012Obituary, Women in Academia

Modern Language Association, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies
* Jan Albert & Monica Fludernik
'Mediacy and Narrative Mediation', ''The Living Handbook of Narratology''
accessed 5 August 2012.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cohn, Dorrit
1924 births
2012 deaths
Indiana University Bloomington faculty
Radcliffe College alumni
Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Stanford University alumni
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Harvard University faculty