Office Location: 108 Science Building, East Campus
Office Phone: +1 919 681 4971
Email Address: toril@duke.edu

Office Hours:

By appointment via email

Education and Interests:

Cand.mag. in French, Spanish and Comparative Literature, University of Bergen
Dr.art. in Comparative Literature, University of Bergen
Mag.art. in Comparative Literature, University of Bergen

eminism, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy & Literature, and 19th & 20th Century European Literature

Toril Moi works on feminist theory and women's writing. She also works quite broadly on the intersections of literature, philosophy and aesthetics. She is particularly interested in finding ways of reading literature with philosophy and philosophy with literature without reducing the one to the other.

Areas of special theoretical interest are psychoanalytic theory, French phenomenology (Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty), and ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell).

Toril Moi also works on theater, and is particularly interested in the emergence of modernism in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Her books include Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985; 2nd edition 2002), Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (1999), republished in a shorter version as Sex, Gender and the Body (2005). She is the editor of The Kristeva Reader (1986), and of French Feminist Thought (1987).

Her new book, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2006. Ibsens modernisme, the Norwegian translation by Agnete Øye, was published by Pax Forlag in Oslo in May 2006. The book won the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the best book in Comparative Literary Studies in 2007.

In spring 2008, the 2nd edition of her book Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (with a major new introductory chapter) will be published by Oxford University Press.

Toril Moi is now working on two projects: (1) The Emergence of European Modernism 1870-1914 and (2) Feminist Theory and Women Writers.

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. T. Moi. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2006. xvi + 396 pp. Norwegian translation: Ibsens modernisme, translated by Agnete Øye (Oslo: Pax, 2006; 502 pp.)
2.  Sex, Gender and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman?. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. (Contains the first two essays in What Is a Woman? and a new preface.)
3.  "Meaning What We Say: The 'Politics of Theory' and the Responsibility of Intellectuals." The Philosophical Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir. Ed. Emily Grosholz. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2004. 139-60. Trans. by the author as: "Å mene det vi sier: om de intellektuelles ansvar", Samtiden, no. 1 (2003), 60-67
4. "From Femininity to Finitude: Freud, Lacan and Feminism, Again." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29.3 (Spring, 2004): 841-78. [Reprinted in Iréne Matthis, ed., Dialogues on Sexuality, Gender, and Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 2004, pp. 93-135]
5. "While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27.4 (Summer, 2002): 1005-36. [Reprinted in Emily R. Grosholz, ed. The Philosophical Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, Oxford: Clarendon Press (Oxford University Press), 2004, 37-68.]
6.  "A Woman's Desire to be Known: Silence and Expressivity in Corinne." Untrodden Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Ghislaine McDayter. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press), 2002. 143-75.

More Information:

Picture credit: Oscar Einzig Photography.

English Home | A&S Home | Duke.edu | Other English Resources