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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 ...”

“... Ipicked up​ The Unforgivable out of pure curiosity. There is something fascinating about opening a book by a writer one knows nothing about. A good reader, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, has to be willing to follow the writer on her adventure. I took her advice, cleared my mind and tried to follow Cristina Campo on her journey. I was in for a shock: in these essays, Campo turned out to be a reactionary elitist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”