nordlitt: How to Postcritique II. The Necessity of Being Vulnerable. In Conversation With Toril Moi

von Nordlitt. Skandinavistische Literaturforschung im Gespräch

What can literary studies be? Toril Moi, Duke University, author of Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell inspires us to educate our judgment and claims that finding a question is the work of literary studies. She helps us read Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament as a Wittgensteinian novel about acknowledgment and invites us to see what fascinates her about Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. On the way, we are encouraged to get lost, learn about our responsibility for our texts, and about Lacan’s treacherous “subject that is supposed to know”.

Timestamps:

(00:00:07)        Introducing Toril Moi
(00:00:42)        Toril Moi’s Relationship to Scandinavian Literatury Studies
(00:06:52)        Stefanie’s Encounter with Toril Moi’s Work
(00:09:07)        How to Define and Talk about Postcritique
(00:18:20)         Wittgensteinian Criticism
(00:26:32)        Fascination and Acknowledgement
(00:31:42)        Criticism as Writing a Travel Report
(00:38:07)        Building an Intellectual Environment for Thriving Ideas
(00:40:11)        Literary Criticism as an Invitation to Conversation
(00:43:59)        The Professor as Lacan’s “Subject That is Supposed to Know
(00:50:16)        On Arrogance
(00:53:01)        Introducing Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament
(00:55:07)        On ‘Truth’ in Will and Testament
(00:57:57)        Acknowledgement in Will and Testament
(01:03:45)        Designing Truthful Characters
(01:11:27)        The Struggle with Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle
(01:16:13)        On Authenticity in Literary Works
(01:22:17)        Pinpointing the Struggle with My Struggle
(01:25:36)        The Novelty of Knausgård’s writing
(01:27:19)        Revealing Yourself and Your Surroundings in Literature
(01:34:59)        Short Summary of Differences in Knausgård’s and Hjorth’s Writing
(01:38:25)        What Advice Would You Give Your Student-Self?

Literature:

  • Hjorth, Vigdis: Arv og miljø. Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2016.
  • Hjorth, Vigdis: Will and Testament. London: Verso, 2019.
  • Knausgård, Karl Ove: Min kamp. Første bok. Oslo: Forlaget Oktober, 2009.
  • Knausgård, Karl Ove: My Struggle. Book One. New York: Archipelago, 2014.
  • Moi, Toril: Revolution of the Ordinary. Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017
  • Moi, Toril: “Describing my struggle”, in The Point, 27.12.2017, https://thepointmag.com/criticism/describing-my-struggle-knausgaard/.
  • Moi, Toril. “A Wittgensteinian Phenomenology of Criticism,” In: Robert Chodat, and John Gibson (ed.): Wittgenstein and Literary Studies, p. 40–60. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023, p. 41-61.

Further reading:

  • Cavell, Stanley: The Claim of Reason. Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Cavell, Stanley: Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.Jameson, Fredric: Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
  • Lacan, Jaques: The Seminar, Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1977.
  • Moi, Toril: Sexual-Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1991.
  • Moi, Toril: What is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Moi, Toril: Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Moi, Toril: Språk og oppmerksomhet. Oslo: Aschehoug, 2013. (Stemmer 1).
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