There will be an interesting workshop on Ibsen and philosophy at Temple University Thursday 2 and Friday 3 May, at the Center City Campus, 1515 Market Street, room 208. For the full program, click here. I will be giving a talk on Hedda Gabler on Friday 3 May.
Posts Tagged ‘ibsen’
25 January 2013
Seminar Celebrating Irene Iversen
The pioneering Norwegian feminist critic Irene Iversen is retiring this year. Her colleagues and friends will celebrate her with a seminar at the University of Oslo on Friday 25 January, from 13:00 – 17:00. I will contribute a very short paper on Ibsen’s Little Eyolf. The seminar will take place in Niels Treschow’s house, room HF-12.
tagged with ibsen , Norwegian literature
20 November 2011
A talk about Emperor and Galilean at the Ibsen Museum in Oslo
Toril Moi will give a talk (in Norwegian) on Emperor and Galilean at the Ibsen Museum in Oslo on Sunday 20 November at 2:00 p.m. The talk will be called “Tro uten kjærlighet” (“Faith without love”). She will focus on the relevance of Ibsen’s great 1873 play for our own time, not least in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011.
tagged with ibsen
Talking about Ibsen and Newfoundland on Canadian Radio
Posted on 7 November 2011
On Sunday 23 October, CBC’s radio program “The Sunday Edition” had a segment on Ibsen, which included an interview with a fascinating young Sudanese artist inspired by Ibsen’s Nora, and a conversation with Paula Dankert, from the National Theatre in Ottawa, and Toril Moi, and the experience of studying Ibsen on Fogo Island. A link to the audio file (available as a pop-up from the page) can be found here.
7 September 2011
The Ark: Ibsen on Fogo Island, Newfoundland
I am embarking on the Ibsen Ark! Off the east coast of Newfoundland, a group of committed theatre artists, actors and theatre students are spending three weeks immersing themselves in Ibsen. I am privileged to be able to go there to join forces with Juni Dahr, the great Norwegian Ibsen actress and her Visjoner Teater company, from September 9 to September 12. The event is organized by the English Theater at The National Arts Center in Ottawa, Canada, in collaboration with Fogo Island Arts Corporation. I am also looking forward to seeing the land where the Vikings landed back in the 11th century!
Emperor and Galilean and terrorism
Posted on 3 August 2011
I have uploaded a brief essay I wrote for Dagens Næringsliv (in Norwegian), about the connection between Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean and terrorism. The pdf file has a beautiful photo from the National Theatre’s brilliant production of the play.
Art, love, and the terror in Norway
Posted on 24 July 2011
Like other Norwegians I am in shock at the terrible events in Oslo and at Utøya on 22 July. My heart goes out to the victims and their families.
I was not in Norway when the horror happened. On 22 July, I was giving a talk about Ibsen’s 1873 play Emperor and Galilean at the National Theatre in London. I only learned about the bombing in Oslo and the massacre at Utøya later that night. When I discovered that the terrorist in Norway saw himself as a crusader against Muslims, I realized that Emperor and Galilean is more dreadfully relevant than ever, for it is about the horrors — persecution, torture, murder, crazed search for martyrdom, wars — produced by religious fanaticism, by people hell-bent on being right, on forcing others to submit to their will, but who have no capacity to love.
In London last week I also saw Tosca. When the heroine find herself blackmailed by Scarpia, the ruthless chief of police, she sings one of the most touching arias in the history of opera: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” – I lived for art, I lived for love — an aria in which she wonders how it can be that she, who has never hurt a soul, now is caught in the brutal web of ruthless power. Puccini’s opera shows that people who live for art and love may find themselves destroyed by people who live for power. There is no happy end for Tosca. Yet she was right to live for art, and for love. As one of the young survivors of Utøya said to CNN: “If one man can show so much hatred, then think of how much love we can all show together.” That response effectively undermines the terrorists’ agenda. It will take a long time for Norway to recover from the horrors of 22 July 2011. But in a response like that one, we glimpse a possibility: maybe, one day, something new, something that, like art, requires love and imagination to come into existence, can be built in the ruins of terror.
22 July 2011
Platform talk at the National Theatre, London
13 June 2011
Harvard University
On June 13 and 14, Toril Moi will give a lecture and a seminar for the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University’s Summer School on “Theater and the Other Arts”. The title of her lecture will be “Ibsen between theater and painting.” It will build on the investigation of painting in Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (2006), and trace the interaction between painting and theater in Ibsen’s oeuvre, and in 19th century theater in general. Why does the advent of modernism break the traditional connection between the two “sister arts”?
tagged with ibsen
14 April 2011
Williams College, Williamstown, MA
On April 14, Toril Moi will participate in a colloquium at the Oakley Center at Williams College, Williamstown. The discussion will focus on her (still unpublished) paper “Something that might resemble a kind of love”: Fantasy and Realism in Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf.” For more information, contact The Oakley Center.
tagged with ibsen , olp , wittgenstein