Toril Moi

My talk, “A Literature of their Own? Women’s Writing: Myths and Realities,” with a special focus on Greek literature in Cyprus, takes the risk of dealing with the highly controversial question of “woman” and “women’s writing”. Offering an aporetical approach to both of these terms, inevitably caught up in debates between essentialist and constructivist positions—as well as “myths” and stereotypes, I shall try to show that they remain a theoretical problem, as well as theoretically significant for us today. Involving a split—whether endorsed or rejected—between Woman and Man or Woman and the Generic, “women’s writing,” this paper argues, may further entail a forcible choice, for a woman, between her Gender and her Humanity. Can we embrace, taking Toril Moi’s lead in returning to Simone de Beauvoir, our bodily—resolutely sexed—being as “lived experience,” a “situation” and a “becoming,” devoid of any metaphysical luggage? Can we think of men and women as embodied beings, material and historical, who act, write, and make choices, without having to eliminate their gendered subjectivity?

Ιn Η Γυναίκα στο Κείμενο: Tέσσερις κύπριες πεζογράφοι συνομιλούν για τη λογοτεχνική γραφή: Μυρτώ Αζίνα, Νάσια Διονυσίου, Μαρία Α. Ιωάννου, Κωνσταντία Σωτηρίου [Woman in the Text: Four Cypriot women prose writers discuss about writing], ed. by Demetra Demetriou and Antonis K. Petrides. Spec. issue of Akti, no. 118 (Spring): 193-219.

[Proofs; please cite published version] In recent years, some prominent scholars have been making a surprising claim: examining literary texts for hidden depths is overblown, misguided, or indeed downright dangerous. Such examination, they’ve warned us, may lead to the loss of world Heidegger warned of (Gumbrecht), to the world-denying metaphysics Nietzsche warned of (Nehamas), or to the suspicious form of hermeneutics Ricoeur warned of (Best, Marcus, Moi). This paper seeks to suggest that, though the concerns are understandable, there’s ultimately nothing to worry about. The fact that Nietzsche himself happily used metaphors of surface and depth suggests that they are not, in fact, metaphysically fraught. The fact that it’s possible to appreciate surfaces at the same time as depths means that there’s no real danger of losing the world. And as for depth-talk turning us into suspicious hermeneuts, that would happen only if we made two fallacious assumptions: first, that all depths are meanings; second, that all hidden features are in a text by accident. But since plenty of authors hide things deliberately, and since what’s hidden often has nothing to do with propositional content, both assumptions are profoundly mistaken.  Meanwhile, the surface/depth metaphor is the only thing that adequately captures the phenomenology of reading, especially when it comes to misdirection-based, hermetic, enigmatic, ironic, or satirical texts, where special activity on our part prompts a sudden leap to a radically different mode of understanding. And unlike its rivals, the surface/depth metaphor reflects a real asymmetry: depths explain surfaces, but not vice versa; surfaces are available without depths, but not the other way around. We need the metaphor, and we need to stay open to hidden depths as we read. As long as we don’t come in with terrible assumptions, nothing bad will happen to us, and plenty of good things will. It’s perfectly safe to go back in the water.

In her 1985 essay attacking Foucault’s discourse on power, Toril Moi begins: “What could be more seductive for feminists than a discourse which, like that of Michel Foucault in La volonté de savoir, focuses on the complex interaction of power and sexuality? …it has after all been feminism which persistently has presented sex and sexuality as a question of power” (95).  Indeed, Foucault’s work on disciplinary power in modern Western society has intrigued feminist scholars, who focus on the question of power relations between sexes.  And yet, as many feminists have noted, Foucault fails to include gender in his analyses of the discourses of power, he fails to recognize that one sex is subjugated in relation to the other, and he fails to realize his own investment in a discourse that privileges a male point of view even as he analyzes the deployment of sexuality. Finally, much of his work seems to provide little room for agency or resistance, since the subject is constituted through discourses of power. I examine the question of whether a theory which forecloses agency of a subject that is sexed, subjugated, and continuously formed within discourses of power can be deployed in a feminist theory of resistance, beyond examinations of subjectivity and ontological study. I believe that Foucault’s theory of power, while sometimes problematic, is relevant for an analysis of gender oppression and also for a theory of resistance that moves beyond the language of sovereign rights.

The article discusses the basic concepts of Janusz Sławiński’s O opisie that are important for Polish literary studies in the wider context of the current discussion on the need to abandon the linguistic approach to literature in search of other ways to better understand the meaning of the work. Doubts expressed by Toril Moi in her book Revolution of the Ordinary regarding the analysis of texts from a traditional textual perspective become a pretext for revising some of the assumptions made by the structuralist school regarding the categories of description formulated, among others, by researchers such as Sławiński and Roland Barthes.

Cyrus Ali Zargar has produced an accessible monograph on virtue ethics in Islam as theorized and narrated by philosophical as well as mystical authors, both from the classical and the medieval periods. Zargar contributes to the field of Islamic studies a superb, refined analysis of the links between storytelling and ethical formation in Islamic philosophy and Sufism. The author guides us through some of the most fascinating ideas elaborated by Islamic philosophers and Sufis on moral anthropology, the habituation of virtue, the place of natural reason in ethical formation, the relationship between ethics and ontoepistemology, and, not least, embodied piety as spiritual praxis. In this review, I draw attention to certain features of Zargar’s rich account in order to illustrate the kinds of insights Zargar distills from his sources. In the end, I also identify questions and paths of inquiry that merit further exploration in the study of narrative ethics in Islam.

This paper addresses the question of writing and sexual difference by tracing the "sextual" politics of anonymity and the pseudonym in contemporary women's writing. Adopting a sensitive perspective toward the conquests of post-structuralism with regard to language and identity, this paper touches upon the cultural necessity of feminist writing (and reading) subjects at the current historical juncture. Often defined as something between mediocrity and catachresis, an exaltation of difference or its excision altogether, women's writing, this paper argues, may be delimiting and closed, but also empowering and enabling.

Published in the electronic literary journal Peri Ou (Sept. 2018), http://www.periou.gr/δήμητρα-δημητρίου-γυναίκα-συγγραφέα/

Διεθνές Συμπόσιο "Γυναίκα: Τέχνη-Λογοτεχνία-Κοινωνία" [International Symposium "Woman: Art-Literature-Society"; with Maria Farantouri, George Veis, Neşe Yaşin, and Nouritza Marossian. Organized by the Cyprus PEN Centre (chapter of PEN International). Kastelliotissa Medieval Hall, Nicosia (June 1, 2018)

Forskningsprogrammet for litteraturstudier ved Aarhus Universitet arrangerte den 19. mai 2021 en paneldebatt om Toril Mois bok Revolution of the Ordinary. Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (2017). Moi selv var invitert til å presentere boka og gå i kritisk dialog med de tre paneldeltakerne Kjersti Bale, Sven Anders Johansson og Tobias Skiveren, som alle hadde fått i oppgave å presentere én god ting, én uklarhet og én svakhet i Mois bok. Vi bringer her de tre debattinnleggene samt Toril Mois svar.

(Open access) This article-based doctoral dissertation is a discussion of the relationship between fiction and theory/philosophy as well as a philosophical reading of Finland-Swedish author Monika Fagerholm’s novel "Diva. En uppväxts egna alfabet med docklaboratorium (en bonusberättelse ur framtiden)" (Diva. The Alphabet of an Adolescence with a Laboratory of Dolls (A Bonus Tale from the Future), 1998). The central questions concern the relationship between theory/philosophy and literature: What role does theory/philosophy have in readings if scholars are not to apply them as theory in a methodological sense, i.e. as a predetermined framework? What does such work look like concerning "Diva"?

The theoretical focus is on the thinking of Toril Moi, who argues for a renegotiation of the traditional relationship between literature and theory and/or philosophy. Moi’s primary criticism concerns the influence hermeneutics of suspicion, poststructuralism, and its deconstructive methods have had on the relationship between theory, philosophy, criticism and fiction. Instead, she proposes a reading which has a philosophical interest but which takes the literary text, its concepts and preoccupations, as its starting point.

The dissertation identifies three key concepts in "Diva": language, corporeality and spatiality. These form the basis for a philosophical reading in which the concepts function as motifs in the novel, as well as a thematic, philosophical discussion on the role of narrative, literature and representations for the protagonist. This opens for a feminist context, and "Diva" is related to Judith Butler’s and Rosi Braidotti’s thinking. The second half of this study consists of five research articles, which show how the novel’s recontextualization of the universal subject as a teenage girl is a way to critically examine the cultural conditions and presuppositions of the subject.

A central trait in Fagerholm’s fiction is identified: categories mix and coincide. This occurs on two levels. Firstly, concerning language, and corporeality in "Diva", the thematic and the textual coincide in such a way that both narrative style and the printed page verge on poetic expression – the flow of meaning is disrupted in both form and content. Secondly, space and place coincide and form an abstract, mental spatiality, which opens an exploration of norms and transgressions, of potential subjectivities.

Artykuł przypomina podstawowe koncepcje istotnego dla polskich badań literaturoznawczych tekstu O opisie Janusza Sławińskiego i włącza go w pole bieżącej dyskusji o konieczności zarzu- cenia lingwistycznego podejścia do literatury na rzecz poszukiwania sposobów pełniejszego zrozumienia sensów utworu. Wątpliwości wyrażone przez Toril Moi pod adresem analizy teks- tów z tradycyjnej tekstualistycznej perspektywy w jej książce Revolution of the Ordinary stają się pretekstem do rewizji niektórych założeń szkoły strukturalnej dotyczących kategorii opisu formułowanych między innymi przez badaczy takich jak właśnie Sławiński czy Roland Barthes.