Powerful Prose

R. L. Victoria Pöhls works as a researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt). Her interest in studying literature with both hermeneutical and empirical methods evolved during graduate studies in cognitive science (University College Dublin) and literature, linguistics, and philosophy (Universität Hamburg). To foster interdisciplinary work at the frontiers of these disciplines, she cofounded the Powerful Literary Fiction Texts-Network in 2019. Her research focuses on comparative, empirical, and cognitive approaches to literature and is especially concerned with the portrayal of minorities.
Mariane Utudji has completed a PhD thesis in English studies and translatology at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris), a work which investigates Salman Rushdie's highly valued prose style and shows how the reading experience it provides can be retained or recreated in French. Her approach to literary texts thus combines stylistics, applied linguistics and translation studies, and she is getting more and more interested in cognitive linguistics. She cofounded the Powerful Literary Fiction Texts-Network in 2019.