Essays and Reviews  by Toril Moi

“Lidenskapens grammatikk,” in Fem kvinner, tre menn og en datter skriver om Vigdis Hjorth (CappelenDamm, 2019).

“Writing for Others: Or, What I Have Learned about Academic Writing from Writing for Newspapers.” An informal presentation at PAL’s Fourth Young Scholars Workshop, entitled “Writing Is Thinking II: Take It to the Next Level.” Held at Duke on Friday March 1, 2013.

“The Adventure of Reading: Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir,” Literature and Theology, 25.2 (June 2011): 125-140. Free access link to the PDF: http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/frr014?ijkey=1OMcdznUgHBW299&keytype=ref

“The Fantasy of the Clear Day.” An informal presentation at PAL‘s Second Young Scholars Workshop, entitled “Writing is Thinking,” held at Duke on Friday January 28, 2011.  About how to get writing done, as a part of everyday life.

“‘They practice their trades in different worlds’: Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” New Literary History 40, no 4 (2009), 801-24. Click here for the pdf. file.

“The Adulteress Wife.” Review of The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.  London Review of Books 32, no. 3 (2010): 3-6. Here’s a pdf file: LRB · Toril Moi · The Adulteress Wife. This file includes letters to the editor, as well as Toril Moi’s reply to the translators’ letter (somewhere in the middle of the letters). On June 20, 2010 Carlin Romano published an essay on the subject in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s a pdf. file: Romano_The Second ‘Second Sex’. Kristiana Arp defends the translators in a review for Powell’s books also dated June 20, 2010. Here is Meryl Altman’s defense of the new translation from The Women’s Review of Books (September, 2010). Nancy Bauer’s review appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 14 August 2011.

Toril Moi also wrote an essay on the first translation of the The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley’s version from 1953: “While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 4 (2002): 1005-1035, and reprinted in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004): 37-68. To download a pdf. file of the Signs essay, click here: Moi_While_We_Wait.

“Barbara Johnson from a Distance”. A paper written for a roundtable at Duke University, November, 2009. For a link to all the files from the roundtable, click here, or download it as a pdf.file:  Barbara Johnson from a Distance.

“What Can Literature Do? Simone de Beauvoir as a Literary Theorist,” PMLA, 124.1 (January), 2009, 189-98. What Can Literature Do?

“‘I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today”, Feminist Theory 9.3 (December 2008), 259-71. “I Am Not a Woman Writer”.

Toril Moi, “Introduction” to the 2004 Signet edition of Camille (The Lady of the Camellias) by Alexandre Dumas the younger (pp. v-xiv). Click Intro Camille for the pdf. file.

“ ‘I Am Not a Feminist, But…’ How Feminism Became the F-word,” PMLA, 2006 121:5 (October 2006), 1735-41. “I’m not a feminist, but…”

“From Femininity to Finitude: Freud, Lacan, and Feminism, Again,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29. 3 (Spring 2004), 841-78. Femininity.

“Meaning What We Say: The ‘Politics of Theory’ and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in Emily R. Grosholz, ed. The Philosophical Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 139-60. Meaning What We Say.

“Discussion or Aggression? Arrogance and Despair in Graduate School.” The GRIND: The Graduate Student Newsletter (Duke University), 4.1 (Fall 2003), 4-5. Here’s a link to the whole issue of The Grind, and here’s a pdf of the essay: Moi_Discussion_and_aggression_GRINDFall03

“A Woman’s Desire to be Known: Silence and Expressivity in Corinne.” In Ghislaine McDayter, ed, Untrodden Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis. Bucknell Review 45.2 (2002): 143-75.  Corinne.

“Is_ Anatomy_Destiny? Freud and Biological Determinism” in Whose Freud? ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 71-92. This essay is also available in Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? (1999).

“Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” New Literary History 22.4 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 1017-1049.

“Feminist, Female, Feminine“ in Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds.), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (London: Macmillan; and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell), 1989, pp. 115-32. This is an edited, shorter version of an essay originally entitled “Feminist Literary Criticism,” published in Ann Jefferson and David Robey (eds.), Modern Literary Theory, 2nd edition (London: Batsford, 1986): 204-21.