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.
She immigrated to the United States with her family in 1939, attending the Lycée Français in New York City.
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 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.
The book won the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature Studies.