Toril Moi Wins Literature Award
Scholar is honored by the Modern Literature Association
The Modern Language Association of America has announced it is awarding its fifteenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Toril Moi, of Duke University, for her book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy, published by Oxford University Press.
The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.
The prize, which consists of a $2,000 check and a certificate, is one of 18 awards that will be presented on 28 December 2007 during the association's annual convention, held this year in Chicago.
The committee's citation for Moi's book reads:
Toril Moi
"The best literary criticism makes us see authors and literary works in a new light and inspires us with a desire to reread them. This is the critical alchemy that Toril Moi achieves with her accessibly written yet genuinely scholarly book. A sustained study of a single major author, the book also has global sweep and interdisciplinary breadth. Moi situates Ibsen and Norway within the European republic of letters, overturns the conventional reading of Ibsen as a realist predecessor of modern theater, and produces a compelling answer to the perennial question, "What is modernism?" By reframing Ibsen as a modernist, Moi gives fresh meaning to Ibsen's work across disciplines and to his influential engagement with modern visual culture.
Toril Moi is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and professor of theater studies and English at Duke University. She received her PhD from the University of Bergen. Moi has lectured around the world.
She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from such organizations as the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Her major books are Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays.
Moi is the editor of the Kristeva Reader and French Feminist Thought. Her essays have been published in journals such as PMLA, Modern Drama, and Signs. Her work has been widely translated.
She is also a regular newspaper columnist in her home country, Norway.