Tzvetan Todorov's pure fantastic and Henry Jame's The Turn of the Screw

AbstractHenry James's The Turn of the Screw is well-knownfor its ambiguity. Though it could serve as a source ofillustrations for several important modern theories oflanguage and literature, it still remains in a certainsense unreadable, since it can be regarded equallyjustifiably as a ghost story or as a case history ofneurosis, without giving any solid basis for a readingwhich could unify the two texts into an organic whole.For this reason, it seems that the approach which canbest satisfy the scholarly as well as the common readeris the application to the story of what, in his book TheFantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,Tzvetan Todorov calls the "pure fantastic." In substancethis thesis attempts to determine as exactly as possiblethe new meaning Todorov gives to the term "fantastic" bycomparing it with the several other usages the word hasbeen and is still receiving in literature, anddemonstrates how well this concept fits in with theirreducible ambiguity 'of The Turn of the Screw.Essentially, Todorov's "pure fantastic" is anarrative genre which produces in the reader a state ofhesitation between interpreting the events in thenarrative as being either uncanny or marvellous. Theeffect of hesitation determines the genre. The Turn ofthe Screw illustrates this theory of Todorov as well asit does several other literary theories