South Central Review

"Engagement" has a very specific resonance in French. One the one hand, since the Dreyfuss affair, it is immediately associated with the general notion of intellectual, while, on the other hand, it is closely bound to the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. This article will not engage (no pun intended) with the thought of Sartre, even though his shadow always lurks in the background, but perhaps slightly unexpectedly with that of Tzvetan Todorov's.

The article will seek to draw out Todorov's conception of the intellectual's role from a range of works spanning more than three decades. Although he is well-known within literary theoretical circles, it seems that the details of his intellectual development are less commonly known. Therefore, a very brief overview of his intellectual biography will help define his intellectual practice as well as the conception of intellectual engagement which we can derive from his body of work. In the latter part of the article I will compare and contrast his definition of the role of the intellectual with that of other prominent intellectuals.¹

A quick search on Google associates the following terms with the query "Tzvetan Todorov": "theory"; "the fantastic"; "narrative"; "narrative theory book"; "the conquest of America"; "the fantastic pdf"; "quotes"; "film theory." Of course, search engines in particular and even the Internet in general cannot be credited to be the most accurate research criteria by academic standards but this gives us a sense, if not of what his intellectual activity is widely perceived to be dealing with, at least in the Anglo-American world, but at any rate of what people who take the trouble to look him up are interested in or expecting to find. In brief, this would seem to be an intuitively accurate reflection of how people have seen and continue to see him. There may well be a major flaw in this reasoning, loosely based on a Google algorithm, but it probably gives an indication of which of his works American syllabi reference in their undergraduate courses the most and by default in which of the disciplines he has engaged with his influence appears strongest. If this is indeed the case, the balance tips predominantly towards his early, structuralist works. [End Page 43]

The most commonly searched terms on Google do not give us an incorrect image of Todorov's intellectual activity, only one frozen in time. Todorov edited a collection of texts by the Russian Formalists and wrote the most successful and complete analysis to this day of fantastic literature. These two works were published, respectively, in 1966 and in 1970.

In the decade which followed, he co-founded with Gérard Genette the series at Le Seuil entitled "Poétique" and together they can be credited with some of the most penetrating analyses of narratives of the 1970s and for the "birth" of narratology ("narratologie"). Those among you familiar with Bakhtin's thought know that Todorov wrote what was for years the definitive introduction to Bakhtin (Mikhail Bakhtine: Le Principe dialogique), at least in France.² This book was phenomenally successful: although it is now out of print in French (Bakhtin's star has waned a little in France), in English it went into eleven reprints. Although it was bought and referenced a lot, it was not read very attentively. There are some sizeable problems with Todorov's interpretation of Bakhtin, it is true, but also some very interesting finds which went largely unnoticed at the time. Interestingly, this book does not come up in the most common search terms associated with Todorov. One reason could be that his reading of Bakhtin was dominated by the trends that actually come up in the search box, in other words a structuralist approach. However, this is a contentious point, which I have explored at length elsewhere.³

Interestingly, his Conquest of America, published in 1982, which truly inaugurates his change of vision and approach as a literary theorist, now appears in the most commonly searched terms (a year or so after his death).⁴ In this work, he analyses the narratives of...