(Mr. Structuralist and the fantastic : rereading The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre by Tzvetan Todorov)

In 1968, when Tzvetan Todorov published The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,it quickly helped to establish both his personal reputation as Mr.Structuralist and structuralism as the way after New Criticism to deal with literature. Four decades later, Todorov retracted his earlier position through a book of disavowal and repudiation. This article advocates a rereading of the early classic not only for understanding what he thought constituted the central features of fantastic fiction but for laying bare his critical attitude towards it as a genre. Such a rereading, it is contended, would also help uncover problems that had beset all attempts at constructing a structuralist poetics and show Todorov self-consciously wrestling with them from the beginning of his theoretical career