LettreR. 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 7For more on the possible over-and under-specificity of empirical and experimental research methodologies dealing with literature as stimulus material, see Stockwell (2021) and Stockwell/Whiteley (2014).
In this article, Mahlu Mertens discusses the narrative possibilities of representing a »world without us« in Ontroerend Goed's play of the same name for an audience or reader who obviously still exists. In »Negating the Human, Narrating a World Without Us«, she argues that part of the text manages to evoke, through its list-like form, tense, and accompanying rhythm, mixed feelings of sadness and comfort in the face of human extinction - instead of the feeling of 'activist melancholia' often elicited by ecological elegies.
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