2015—Tzvetan Todorov
Born in Bulgaria in 1939, Tzvetan Todorov studied under Roland Barthes in the 1960s and quickly established himself as one of the pre-eminent French structuralists. His Grammaire du Décameron (1969) begins to lay out a “narrative grammar” that he elaborated in subsequent work. Poétique de la prose (1971) breaks further ground in parsing narrative elements and remains one of the most widely cited works of narratology. Todorov also elucidates distinctions between two forms of detective fiction (“whodunit” and “thriller”) that have remained foundational. These early books, as well as essays published in such journals as Poétique and Diacritics, strongly influenced subsequent contributions like Genette’s Discours du recit, Gerald Prince’s Narratology, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction, and the possible worlds theories of Lubomír Doležel and Marie-Laure Ryan.
Todorov’s work on the fantastic (1975) has shaped critical understanding of the supernatural as narrative and has influenced the formation of unnatural narratology. His Mikhail Bakhtin, principe dialogique (1981), intervened at an important stage in the history of narrative theory to help effect the turn toward a “postclassical narratology” concerned with ideology as well as form. If Todorov’s more recent work on colonialism, race, Enlightenment, and modernity has foregone an explicit narratological focus, narrative texts remain methodologically prominent in such books as Les morales de l’histoire (1991) and La fragilité du bien (1999). His own practice of the “récit exemplaire” allows him to think philosophically through narrative strategies. Todorov thus continues to show us how narrative makes meaning in the modern age.