Tzvetan Todorov

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Tzvetan Todorov (Bulgarian: Цветан Тодоров) (born March 1, 1939 in Sofia) is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher. He has lived in France since 1963 writing books and essays about literary theory, thought history and culture theory.

Todorov has published a total of 21 books, including The Poetics of Prose (1971), Introduction to Poetics (1981), The Conquest of America (1982), Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984), Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991), On Human Diversity (1993), Hope and Memory (2000), and Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (2002). Todorov's historical interests have focused on such crucial issues as the conquest of The Americas and the Nazi and Stalinist concentration camps.

Todorov has been a visiting professor at several universities, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley.

Todorov's honors include the Bronze Medal of the CNRS, the Charles Lévêque Prize of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and the first Maugean Prize of the Académie Française and the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences; he also is an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Todorov lives in Paris with his wife Nancy Huston and their two children.

Todorov's greatest contribution to literary theory was his defining of the fantastic, the fantastic uncanny, and the fantastic marvelous. Todorov defines the fantastic as being any event that happens in our world that seems to be supernatural. Upon the occurrence of the event, we must decide if the event was an illusion or whether it is real and has actually taken place. Todorov uses Alvaro from Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux as an example of a fantastic event. Alvaro must decide whether the woman he is in love with is truly a woman or if she is the devil.

Upon choosing whether the event was real or imaginary, Todorov says that we enter into the genres of uncanny and marvelous. In the fantastic uncanny, the event that occurs is actually an illusion of some sort. The "laws of reality" remain intact and also provide a rational explanation for the fantastic event. Todorov gives examples of dreams, drugs, illusions of the senses, madness, etc. as things that could explain a fantastic/supernatural event. In the fantastic marvelous, the supernatural event that occurs has actually taken place and therefore the "laws of reality" have to be changed to explain the event. Only if the implied reader cannot opt for one or the other possibility, the text is purely fantastic.

Aside from his work in literary theory, Todorov also dabbled in philosophy. He wrote Frail Happiness about the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He focuses on Rousseau's ideas of attaining human happiness and how we can live in 'modern' times.

In one of his major works, "Facing the Extreme," Todorov asks whether it is true the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags revealed that in extreme situations "all traces of moral life evaporate as men become beasts locked in a merciless struggle for survival?"(pages 31–46) That opinion is a commonplace of popularized accounts of the camps, and also appears in accounts of survivors themselves. Primo Levi, quoted in Todorov, writes that camp life is a "continuous war of everyone against everyone." To survive, all dignity and conscience had to be sacrificed and everyone is alone. Reports from gulag survivors are similar. However Todorov, in his reading of actual survivor testimonies, says the picture is not that bleak, that there many examples of inmates helping each other and showing compassion in human relationships despite the inhumane conditions and terror. Survivors point out that survival always depended on the help of others. He concludes that life in the camps and gulag did not follow the law of the jungle and that the counterexamples are numerous, even in Levi's work.

Bibliography

• Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970), translated as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre in 1973
• Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (1984), translated from the French by Richard Howard.
• Facing the extreme : moral life in the concentration camps (2000), translated by Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack.
• Fragility of goodness : why Bulgaria's Jews survived the Holocaust (2001), a collection of texts with commentary by Tzvetan Todorov.
• Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau(2001), translated by John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky
• French tragedy : scenes of civil war, summer 1944 (1996), translated by Mary Byrd Kelly ; translation edited and annotated by Richard J. Golsan.
• Hope and memory : lessons from the twentieth century (2003), translated by David Belos.
• Imperfect garden : the legacy of humanism (2002), translated by Carol Cosman.
• Life in common : an essay in general anthropology (2001), translated by Katherine Golsan and Lucy Golsan ; with a new afterword by the author.
• Mikhail Bakhtin : the dialogical principle (1984), translated by Wlad Godzich.
• New world disorder : reflections of a European (2005), preface by Stanley Hoffmann ; translated by Andrew Brown.
• On human diversity : nationalism, racism, and exoticism in French thought (1993), translated by Catherine Porter.
• Voices from the Gulag : Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (1999), Tzvetan Todorov (ed.) ; translated by Robert Zaretsky.
• (French)"'Humanisme, libéralisme et esprit des Lumières, entretien de Karim Emile Bitar avec Tzvetan Todorov' ('Humanism, Liberalism and the Spirit of the Enlightenment')". L'ENA hors les murs. June, 2007. http://cyrano.blog.lemonde.fr/2008/04/01/entretien-avec-tzvetan-todorov-humanisme-liberalisme-et-esprit-des-lumieres/. 
• (French)"'L'esprit des Lumières a encore beaucoup à faire dans le monde d'aujourd'hui' ('The Spirit of the Enlightenment still has a lot to do in today's world')". Le Monde. March 4, 2006. http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-747585@51-696669,0.html. 
• "'In search for lost crime: Tribunals, apologies, reparations, and the search for justice.'" (PDF). The New Republic. January 26, 2001. http://www.iphimeda.be/Todorov__2001__in_search_of_lost_crimes___reparations.pdf. 

Awards

• Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences

See also

• Fantastic
• Genre studies