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I came with a sword

Toril Moi: Simone Weil’s Way, 1 July 2021

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas 
by Robert Zaretsky.
Chicago, 181 pp., £16, February 2021, 978 0 226 54933 0
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... of, and to shore up our shaky faith in the possibility that this world can be changed.Listen to Toril Moi discuss this piece on the LRB ...

The Adulteress Wife

Toril Moi: Beauvoir Misrepresented, 11 February 2010

The Second Sex 
by Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, translated by Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
Cape, 822 pp., £30, November 2009, 978 0 224 07859 7
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... In June 1946 Simone de Beauvoir was 38. She had just finished The Ethics of Ambiguity, and was wondering what to write next. Urged by Jean Genet, she went to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, on show for the first time after the war. Citizen Kane was also being shown in Paris for the first time, and Beauvoir was impressed: Orson Welles had revolutionised cinema ...

It isn’t your home

Toril Moi: Sarraute gets her due, 10 September 2020

Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between 
by Ann Jefferson.
Princeton, 425 pp., £34, August 2020, 978 0 691 19787 6
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... When I mentioned​ to a friend that I was going to review a biography of Nathalie Sarraute, his first question was: ‘Will she last?’ I hesitated to reply. First of all, it’s not clear what it means for a writer to ‘last’. Do we mean that she wrote books that will be read for pleasure for centuries, like Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina? Sarraute was too avant-garde – too highbrow – to compete with Austen in the popularity stakes ...

Don’t look back

Toril Moi: Rereading Duras, 13 April 2023

The Easy Life 
by Marguerite Duras, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan.
Bloomsbury, 208 pp., £12.99, December 2022, 978 1 5266 4865 5
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... From the​ 1970s to the 1990s anyone who, like me, was interested in French women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the Lacanian framework ...

Mother’s back

Lorna Sage: Feminists with Tenure, 18 May 2000

What is a Woman? And Other Essays 
by Toril Moi.
Oxford, 517 pp., £25, October 1999, 9780198122425
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... Feminism is fiftysomething if you start counting from The Second Sex, and, like Toril Moi, a lot of academic women are taking stock. The good news is that wherever positive discrimination in favour of men has been suspended, there are many more women in universities than there used to be, as students, teachers and even tenured professors ...

Thinking Women

Jane Miller, 6 November 1986

... a week of the publication of What is feminism?, for instance, and from the same publisher, comes Toril Moi’s The Kristeva Reader.2 The books could be said to represent antithetical strands of current feminist work. At its worst, What is feminism? has too much honing of watertight definitions of feminism and too much reworking of old research topics ...

Staging Death

Martin Puchner: Ibsen's Modernism, 8 February 2007

Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy 
by Toril Moi.
Oxford, 396 pp., £25, August 2006, 0 19 929587 5
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... realists such as George Eliot, not with formally innovative Modernists such as Joyce. It is Toril Moi’s aim, in this magisterial book, to make a new case for Ibsen against such opposition. The problem with Ibsen’s detractors, Moi says, is that they have a narrow understanding of Modernism, based on the formal ...

All in the Family

Sylvia Lawson, 3 December 1992

Letters to Sartre 
by Simone de Beauvoir and Quintin Hoare.
Radius, 531 pp., £20, December 1991, 0 09 174774 0
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Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvior, 1926-1939 
edited by Simone de Beauvior, translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee.
Hamish Hamilton, 448 pp., £20, November 1992, 9780241133361
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... exchange of gifts, and the manifestly irrepressible pleasure of each in the other’s existence. Toril Moi has incisively analysed these and other attacks in her Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir, and she is right to discern real ad feminam viciousness in the assaults from both sectarian feminist and misogynist positions; often, sad to ...

What’s the hook?

Helen Thaventhiran, 27 January 2022

Hooked: Art and Attachment 
by Rita Felski.
Chicago, 199 pp., £18, October 2020, 978 0 226 72963 3
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... been sketched by Michael Polanyi, Paul Ricoeur, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Stephen Best, Toril Moi, Hal Foster, Namwali Serpell and others. Her current work is perhaps the liveliest and least plangent forum for questions about how to read and write criticism after theory. But read in isolation from this larger and longer conversation, it can ...

A Message like You

Daniel Soar: Distrusting Character, 10 August 2023

Ten Planets 
by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman.
And Other Stories, 108 pp., £11.99, February, 978 1 913505 61 5
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... in real life, they make us feel we have our own relationship with them. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ Flaubert said, but for more than 150 years readers have responded: ‘Hang on, M. Flaubert. I think you’ll find that actually Madame Bovary is moi’ – or at least ‘mine’.This characteristic of characters, that ...

Baby-Sitter

Elaine Showalter, 14 June 1990

Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography 
by Deirdre Bair.
Cape, 718 pp., £19.95, June 1990, 9780224020480
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Lettres à Sartre. Vol I: 1930-1939 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 400 pp., frs 120, February 1990, 2 07 071829 8
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Lettres à Sartre. Vol II: 1940-1963 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 443 pp., frs 120, February 1990, 2 07 071864 6
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Journal de Guerre, Septembre 1939-Janvier 1941 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 371 pp., February 1990, 2 07 071809 3
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In the Shadow of Sartre 
by Liliane Siegel, translated by Barbara Wright.
182 pp., £12.95, May 1990, 9780002153362
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... of the resentment that has always greeted Beauvoir’s powerful and uncompromising work. As Toril Moi has argued in an important essay on Beauvoir’s critical reputation, the sexist critics’ ‘favourite strategy is to personalise the issues, to reduce the book to the woman: their aim is clearly to discredit Beauvoir as a speaker, not to enter ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif ...

Itemised

Fredric Jameson, 8 November 2018

My Struggle: Book 6. The End 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 1153 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 84655 829 0
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... into a confession avant la lettre?But is it really guilt at all? Is this really a confession? Toril Moi has suggested that what troubles Knausgaard (without perhaps his having any great awareness of the distinction) is not guilt but shame. Guilt demands expression and above all confession; but the openness which ...

The earth had need of me

Joanna Biggs: A nice girl like Simone, 16 April 2020

Becoming Beauvoir: A Life 
by Kate Kirkpatrick.
Bloomsbury, 476 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 1 350 04717 4
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Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me, a Memoir 
by Deirdre Bair.
Atlantic, 347 pp., £18.99, February 2020, 978 1 78649 265 4
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Diary of a Philosophy Student, Vol. II: 1928-29 
by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Barbara Klaw.
Illinois, 374 pp., £40, June 2019, 978 0 252 04254 6
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... flicker of fear’ over this arrangement, a feeling she immediately subdued. Scholars including Toril Moi have seen her acceptance of the pact as a strategy for dealing with her fear of losing Sartre, but she seems to have suffered all the same. Bair says in her new memoir that nearly all Beauvoir’s friends remember her sometimes leaving the ...

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