The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other

History

TZVETAN TODOROV

Americas

HarperCollins, Publishers

`Graceful and gigantic... a fascinating tour through the subtlety, integrity and brave honesty of Todorov's thought.' New York Times Book Review. In Facing the Extreme, the internationally renowned writer and critic Tzvetan Todorov focuses on the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag to examine our capacity for moral behaviour. Drawing widely on the testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors, Todorov creates a vivid portrait of the conduct of those who ran the camps and those who suffered their outrages. Challenging the widespread view that moral life is extinguished in such extreme circumstances, he uncovers instead a rich universe composed not of grand acts but of innumerable ordinary gestures of dignity and care, compassion and solidarity. Described as `a masterpiece' by Stanley Hoffman in Foreign Affairs, Facing the Extreme restores, in supple, eloquent prose, a dimension of these terrible periods that has been lost to historians and moral philosophers. `Facing the Extreme is very much more than a eulogy to courage; it is a song to life. One of the finest intellectual minds of our time goes beyond the question of why to answer how integrity comes to be.' Gitta Sereny.

Facing the Extreme: Moral Life In the Concentration Camps

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Manchester University Press

Introduction a la Litterature Fantastique

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

French & European Pubns

In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between idea and fact. His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory. As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aurélia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.

The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

Contemporary

Cornell University Press

Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language

"All of [the] articles are well-informed and useful and many... are models of lucidity and acumen... Porter's translation is stylish, accurate, and highly readable."--MLN"A valuable addition to any linguistics or stylistics library and is helpful reading for anyone who wishes to find his bearings in, particularly, Continental, modern linguistics."--Style."The attempted coverage is nothing if not panoramic: linguists from Panini through to Chomsky, fields from language pathology to literary theory, concepts from generative rules to fictional viewpoint."--Times Literary Supplement

Oswald Ducrot

The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (A Volume in the CWRU Press Translations)

Science Fiction

Press of Case Western Reserve University

Todorov's contention is that totalitarianism imposed itself because, more than any other political system, it fed on people's need for the absolute: it promised to endow life with meaning by enabling them to take part in the construction of paradise on earth. As a result, millions of people lost their lives in the name of a higher good. Tzvetan Todorov's brilliantly incisive book examines the history of the past century by analyzing its spectacular political conflicts and by offering moving profiles of individuals who, at great personal cost, resisted the strictures of the communist and Nazi regimes. Hope and Memory is a profound moral and political history by one of the world's most original thinkers. It confirms how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the crimes of the past continue to cast long shadows.

Hope and Memory : Reflections on the Twentieth Century

World

ATLANTIC BOOKS *

Tzvetan Todorov argues that although our liberal democracies are the offspring of the Enlightenment, they also illustrate the ways in which its ideas have been distorted and perverted. People living in contemporary democracies are often baffled by phenomena which resist easy judgement: globalisation and media omnipotence; disinformation and state-sponsored torture; moralism and the right of intervention; the dominance of economics and the triumph of technology. In this book, Todorov shows that we cannot learn lessons from the past unless we know how to relate them to the present. He demonstrates that what remains relevant to today is the spirit expressed in the core principles and values for which the Enlightenment stood. In a period of great uncertainty, In Defence of the Enlightenment could not be more timely.

In Defence of the Enlightenment

'Almost alone among contemporary critics, Tzvetan Todorov has chosen to apply his prodigious talents to the literature of twentieth-century totalitarianism. His unique gift is his ability to elucidatethe memoirs and writings of some of the century's greatest survivors, not merely discovering their literary qualities, but also finding in their works moral and political lessons, relevant to us all.' -- Anne ApplebaumTzvetan Todorov identifies totalitarianism as the major innovation of the twentieth century and examines the struggle between this system and democracy and its effects on human life and consciousness.Totalitarianism imposed itself because, more than any other political system, it played on people's need for the absolute: it fed their hope to endow life with meaning by taking part in the construction of a paradise on earth. As a result, millions of people lost their lives in the name of a higher good. This unique account explores the history of the past century by analyzing its spectacular political conflicts and by offering moving profiles of individuals who, at great personal cost, resisted the strictures of the communist and Nazi regimes. Hope and Memory reaffirms the legacy of the past as we move into the twenty-first century.'A very rich book, full of interesting - and often highly controversial - conversation as well as moving portraits of striking figures of the century that has just passed. It is addressed to a general public very much engaged in discussing what the twentieth century was all about and where we are going from here.' Charles Taylor

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Books by TZVETAN TODOROV