Photo: EFE / Marta Pérez
Tzvetan Todorov is the most perfect example of that idea of Beatriz Sarlo, according to which those who are trained in literary criticism will have after the instrumental theoretical need to study critically other objects, whether or not made of words. Todorov shifted from the analysis of stamp structuralism to the history of ideas, and from there to the aesthetics.
Todorov died yesterday, in Paris, at age 77, due to complications arising from a “neurodegenerative disease”. The daughter of the author reported the news and added that Todorov had finished his latest book, due out in march and that, not coincidentally, is called Le triomphe de l artiste (the triumph of The artist). He was director of the Centre de Recherche sur les Arts et le Langage, professor at the universities of Columbia, Harvard and Yale, awarded doctor honoris causa by the University of Liège and Prince of Asturias award for Social Sciences in 2008
Todorov was born in 1939 in Sofia, and, after studying philology in Bulgaria, he settled in Paris around 1963 and was formed in the shadow of Roland Barthes, who in some way ended up being to him a model of intellectual (also, and before, the own Barthes had become a formidable cultural critic).
To understand this period of training is necessary to go back to the number 8 of the journal Communications, published in 1966 by the Centre for the Study of Mass Communications of the École Pratique de Hautes Études of Paris. With a few pages away, there were the writings “Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives”, Barthes, and “The categories of the literary story” of Todorov. All of that number had been likely to attempt more “organic” to define the models of the story from the times of the formalistic russians. The reference is not arbitrary. Todorov himself had been the one who, in the volume Theory of literature, the formalists Russian (1965), was in charge of the circulation of the basic texts of Viktor Shklovsky, Iuri Tinianov and, above all, Vladimir Propp. Of them, Todorov learned a model of the story that he then put into practice as a structural analysis in a rhetoric very similar to that of the formalists. In Critical criticism (1991), the author himself defined it in his fascination by the formalists: “The first printing consisted of this discovery: it was possible to speak of literature in the form joyful, irreverent, inventive, and at the same time, their texts treated of that of which no one seemed to worry, and that, however, I had always believed essential that: the literary technique”.
Past the embers of structuralist, Todorov studied in-depth Illustration and concentrated on the uses -and abuses – of the historical memory. In Against the limit (1991), studied the conditions of existence of the moral in extreme circumstances (concentration camps or totalitarian regimes, which he learned firsthand in his years bulgarians, i.e. two cases) and the links that can be established there between morality and aesthetics: “it’s Always the case of acts aesthetic, the sessions of recitation and the concerts of Bach in Auschwitz were also moral acts, since, making the world better than it was until then, improved in addition to those participating in them”. Would come later, in 1995, The abuses of memory.
Todorov visited Argentina in 2010. Given that he had written many times about the memory of public events include the risk of injury, you are then invited to the Park of the Memory. To realize his intelligence could be mentioned, due to its proximity to our circumstances, a few lines of the article that he wrote after that trip: “The Story helps us to come out of the illusion manichaean in which we often enclose the memory: the division of humanity into two watertight compartments, good and bad, victims and executioners, innocent and guilty. If we do not get access to the Story, how could be crowned by the success of the call Never again!?”.
Introduction to the fantastic literature (1970)
Study key stage structuralist theorist
Front to the limit (1991)
The problem and the dilemmas of morality in extreme conditions
The abuses of memory (1995)
A lucid discussion of the sacralization of memory
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