Book, Introduction to fantasy literature[LS]

From the Zaragoza Manuscript by Potocki to Kafka, from the Arabian Nights to Poe or Nerval, fantastic literature offers us the unusual attractions of a specific genre whose particularity, however, has not yet been defined. But in the current state of poetics, the examination of this question has become as inevitable as that of the question of the systematic grouping of different properties of discourse, that is, precisely, that of genre. Looking for the elements that define it in the case of the fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov shows that its determination must pass through the implicit reader of the text: it is just the preserved hesitation (of that reader) between a natural explanation (the strange) and a supernatural explanation (the wonderful).On the other hand, it is not possible to conceptualize fantastic literature without carrying out a study of the themes whose network constitutes it. The fantastic, in the terms in which poetics analyzes its organization (which has nothing to do with interpretation), is elaborated from one or another of its series: relationship with the world, perception, gaze, relationship with the other, unconscious , language. In doing so, Introduction to Fantastic Literature constitutes a reference work, and not just because of its object, as, for the first time, literary studies manage, through it, to delimit a genre based on a type of writing that is often stigmatized. as “minor”. This achievement is that of a scholar whose contribution marks the contemporary theoretical debate. Furthermore, Tzvetan Todorov takes to the forefront, in the criticism of the literary phenomenon, the tradition of an avant-garde and illustrated humanism, which ranges from the Russian formalists and the structural approach of narrativity to the concept of alterity, always with the same rigor as a researcher and originality of perspective.