Toril Moi
| Toril Moi | |
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Toril Moi in 2006
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| Born | 28 November 1953 Norway |
| Occupation | literary critic, theorist |
| Subject | Feminist literary criticism, culture, theater |
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Toril Moi (born 28 November 1953 in Norway) is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke University. Moi is also the Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke. She attended University of Bergen. Previously she held positions as a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and as Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Bergen, Norway. She lived in Oxford, United Kingdom from 1979 to 1989. Currently she lives in North Carolina. She works on feminist theory and women's writing; on the intersections of literature, philosophy and aesthetics; on "finding ways of reading literature with philosophy and philosophy with literature without reducing the one to the other."
In 2002 she was awarded an honorary degree, doctor philos. honoris causa, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In 1998 she won Duke's University Teacher of the Year Award and in 2008 she won the Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring of Graduate Students.
She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Moi made her name with Sexual/Textual Politics of 1986, a survey of second-wave feminism in which she tellingly contrasted the more empirical Anglo-American school of writings, such as gynocriticism, with the more theoretical French proponents of Ecriture feminine. While widely perceived at the time as an attack on the Anglo-American approach, Moi would later highlight her respect for their more politicized stance, as opposed to the idealism of the post-structuralists. The book would also explore the concept of androgyny, and its links with the anti-essentialism of the French school.
It was followed by further explorations of contemporary French feminists such as Julia Kristeva, before Moi turned to her ground-breaking nineties study of Simone de Beauvoir. A decade later, however, with her focus of attention shifting more to ordinary language philosophy from existentialism, Moi would regretfully conclude that the initial excitement around women's literature had unfortunately been dissipated in a theoretical fog of issues around gender, performativity and the post-structuralist subject.
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