literary theory – Toril Moi

Real Characters

February 21, 2020 No Comments

This piece was published in The Point Magazine in January 2020. It shows how modern academic literary criticism came to accept as dogmatic the the idea that one must not treat characters as if they were real. It also shows that this taboo prevents us from understanding what is going on in the recent “existential turn”: writing in which characters are supposed to come across as real, ranging from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle books to Elena Ferrante’s intensely psychological and historical Naples quartet. The essay is based on and continues work I did in Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies co-written with Rita Felski and Amanda Anderson (Chicago, 2019).

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, and Professor of English, and Theater Studies at Duke University. She is Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke.

In spring 2009, she was a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.

Toril Moi grew up in the countryside in the south-west of Norway, and was educated at the University of Bergen. From 1979 to 1989 she lived mostly in Oxford, UK, and since 1989 she has been a resident of North Carolina.

As an academic, she writes on feminism, literary theory, ordinary language philosophy and literature. Her first book, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985) has been translated into fifteen languages. Her 1994 book Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman has been translated into five languages, and a new 2nd edition was published in 2008. Her book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism won the MLA's award for best book in comparative literary studies for 2007. Her most recent book on feminist theory is Sex, Gender and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman (2005).

In Norway, Toril Moi also writes widely for newspapers and magazines.