tzetan todorov

Tzvetan Todorov (Bulgarian: Цветан Тодоров) (born March 1, 1939 in Sofia) is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher. He has lived in France since 1963 with his wife Nancy Huston and their two children, writing books and essays about literary theory,thought history and culture theoryTodorov has published a total of 21 books, including The Poetics of Prose (1971), Introduction to Poetics (1981), The Conquest of America (1982), Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984), Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991), On Human Diversity (1993), Hope and Memory (2000), and Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (2002). Todorov's historical interests have focused on such crucial issues as the conquest of The Americas and the Nazi and Stalinist concentration camps.


Todorov's theory is "the fantastic"; the fantastic is the study of whether a supernatural occurance is actually real and happenening or whether it has been an illisuion. After deciding whether the event is real or an illisuion, Todorov thinks we enter the stages of uncanny and marvelous. In the event of a fantastic uncanny, the event that has taken place is an illusion with an explanation; the fantastic uncanny can include dreams, drugs etc. In the fantastic marvelous the event has actually taken place which means the laws of reality have to change.
Todorov also developde the theory of the equlibriums; the equilibriam is the part of a film when everything is peaceful at the beginning, the disequilibrium is the opposite of the equlibrium in the way that it is when the bad stuff is happening and then the new eqilibrium is when peace occurs again better than before.


An example of the equilibrium 

An example of the disequilibrium is

An example of the new equilibrium is