Tzvetan Todorov

Works

• 1970The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

  Defines the fantastic as the hesitation of a reader between a natural and a supernatural explanation, between the “uncanny” and the “marvellous”.

• 1982The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other

  Studies Columbus, Cortés, Las Casas and Sahagún to ask how Europeans understood – and failed to understand – the Indigenous peoples they conquered.

Position

Todorov’s first contribution was to French structuralism. By translating and presenting the Russian Formalists he gave structuralist literary theory a history of its own, and in “Grammaire du Décaméron” (1969) he proposed the word “narratology” for a science of narrative. “The Fantastic” (1970) defined a genre by the reader’s response: the fantastic lasts as long as the hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation; once it is resolved, the text passes into the uncanny or the marvellous. Stanisław Lem criticised the book (1974) for building categories without regard to literary value, Rosemary Jackson (1981) for neglecting the social and psychological meaning of fantasy. His study of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) helped to introduce Bakhtin in the West and marked his own turn from structure to dialogue. In “The Conquest of America” (1982) and “On Human Diversity” (Nous et les autres, 1989) he asked how others can be recognised as equal and different at once, criticising both ethnocentric universalism and the relativism he found in Lévi-Strauss; later books on totalitarianism, memory and the Enlightenment defended a “critical humanism”. Historians objected to his thesis that the Aztecs were defeated partly because of a different relation to signs and communication, and to his reliance on Spanish sources.

Life & context

Tzvetan Todorov was born on 1 March 1939 in Sofia, where he studied Slavic philology. In 1963 he went to Paris to continue his studies and stayed. Under the supervision of Roland Barthes he wrote a doctorate on Laclos’s “Les Liaisons dangereuses”, published as “Littérature et signification” (1967). In 1965 he published “Théorie de la littérature”, an anthology of the Russian Formalists in French translation with a preface by Roman Jakobson, which made their work known in France. From 1968 he worked at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), where he later became director of research, and in 1970 he founded the journal “Poétique” with Gérard Genette. He taught as a visiting professor at several American universities, among them Yale and Berkeley, and became a French citizen in the 1970s. From the early 1980s he turned from poetics to the history of ideas and to moral and political questions – the conquest of America, the camps of the twentieth century, memory and the European Enlightenment. In 2008 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences. He died in Paris on 7 February 2017.

Further main works

• Theory of Literature (ed., Théorie de la littérature, 1965)
• Grammar of the Decameron (Grammaire du Décaméron, 1969)
• The Fantastic (Introduction à la littérature fantastique, 1970)
• Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Mikhaïl Bakhtine, le principe dialogique, 1981)
• The Conquest of America (La Conquête de l’Amérique, 1982)
• On Human Diversity (Nous et les autres, 1989)