Essays
Essays and Reviews by Toril Moi
“‘They practice their trades in different worlds’: Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” New Literary History 40, no 4 (2009), 801-24. Click here for the pdf. file.
“The Adulteress Wife.” Review of The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. London Review of Books 32, no. 3 (2010): 3-6. Here’s a pdf file: LRB · Toril Moi · The Adulteress Wife. This file includes letters to the editor, as well as Toril Moi’s reply to the translators’ letter (somewhere in the middle of the letters). On June 20, 2010 Carlin Romano published an essay on the subject in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s a pdf. file: Romano_The Second ‘Second Sex’. Kristiana Arp defends the translators in a review for Powell’s books also dated June 20, 2010.
Toril Moi also wrote an essay on the first translation of the The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley’s version from 1953: “While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 4 (2002): 1005-1035, and reprinted in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004): 37-68. To download a pdf. file of the Signs essay, click here: Moi_While_We_Wait.
“Barbara Johnson from a Distance”. A paper written for a roundtable at Duke University, November, 2009. For a link to all the files from the roundtable, click here, or download it as a pdf.file: Barbara Johnson from a Distance.
“What Can Literature Do? Simone de Beauvoir as a Literary Theorist,” PMLA, 124.1 (January), 2009, 189-98. What Can Literature Do?
“‘I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today”, Feminist Theory 9.3 (December 2008), 259-71. “I Am Not a Woman Writer”.
“ ‘I Am Not a Feminist, But…’ How Feminism Became the F-word,” PMLA, 2006 121:5 (October 2006), 1735-41. “I’m not a feminist, but…”
“From Femininity to Finitude: Freud, Lacan, and Feminism, Again,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29. 3 (Spring 2004), 841-78. Femininity.
“Meaning What We Say: The ‘Politics of Theory’ and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in Emily R. Grosholz, ed. The Philosophical Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 139-60. Meaning What We Say.
“A Woman’s Desire to be Known: Silence and Expressivity in Corinne.” In Ghislaine McDayter, ed, Untrodden Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis. Bucknell Review 45.2 (2002): 143-75. Corinne.