These are roughly the major themes of his Poetics of the Prose (Poétique de la prose: 1971, 1978, 1980), followed by a “conceptual” book (or a book dealing only with concepts) in a cooperation with Oswald Decreaux, one of the leading specialists in modern science for language. In their systematic Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sciences for Language4F (Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage, 1972) there are exhaustive and lucid descriptions of the crucial concepts in modern linguistics (O. Decreaux) and poetics (C. Todorov) both from a traditional (historical) and modern (topical) point of view. As it may be supposed, the road and the procedure in that “dictionary” are reverse, in comparison with those from the book Literature and Meaning: here there are definitions of for instance, “text”, “discourse”, “expression”, “style”, “character”, “vision” or “figure” as units of concrete literary works that must be identified, since they produce these works; there – the reading of the works leads to these components, that define the abstract entity literature.
Two types of the most general units, of configuration and of evocation5F, are the starting points of everyone who intends to discuss about a concrete literary work. The former are material by nature and therefore they can be compared to what is named as a sensual side of the sign, in a De Saucirean sense of that word; the latter are ideal by nature and that is the reason why they can be compared to what is called as a representative side of the sign. Still more simply: the first one is a sound, syllable, word, phrase, and a discourse; the second one is the sense of that phrase, composed of words, and these are composed of syllables in which we recognise sounds. In order to learn/understand (=sense), first something must be recognised. This recognition (=reconnaпtre)6F is, as it has been known for a long time, the basics of rhetoric which, as Aristotle said, is concerned with how speeches (=discourses) are compiled, whereas learning/understanding (=connaпtre) is the basics of interpretation (hermeneutics), which, for its part, studies the reading rules.
Hence, there are three possibilities for the one who analytically and reasonably (=scientifically) wants to discuss on a literary work: a) rhetorical, which starts from configuration = sign, b) hermeneutic, which begins from evocation = meaning, and c) structural7F, which commences from the natural, the indelible sign-meaning unity. Todorov presents the first possibility in an exhaustive form (from Plato’s practice all the way to the practice of Jacobson and Freud) in the book Theories of the Symbol (Théories des symbole, 1977): “I wanted this book to be used as a source of documents” (ibid, 18); the second possibility – in the second book– a continuation of the previous one, with a title Symbolism and Interpretation (Symbolisme et interpretation, 1978): “my ambition is (…) to show why several interpretations are possible and how they function (ibid, 21); whereas the third one, in the book Discursive Genres (Les genres du discours, 1978), in which he examines and defines characteristics of various letters (psychotic, narrative, poetic) that appear under the forms: novella or novel (E.A. Poe, Novalis), a particular kind of non-linear poetry (Rembeau), magic, saying or a witty maxim.
If to this are added: a special book discussing major critical theories and practices in our century: Russian formalists, Brecht, Sartre, Blanchot, Bart, Fray, Vat and Benichou) (Critique de la critique, 1984); then a special book with texts by “the dialogical” Bakhtin and critical comments on these texts (Mikhail Bakhtin: le principe dialogique, 1982); presentation, revision, and translations of certain texts for the book Questions of Poetics (Questions de poétique, 1974) by Roman Josipovic Jacobson, to which two more books should be added: Russian Folly Poetry (Russie folie poésie, 1986) and One Life in Language (Une vie dans la langue, 1985); the long work as an editor and collaborator in the specialist literary magazine Poétique, it will not be exaggeration to say that it is an imposing scientific work that puts Cvetan Todorov (that a little malicious Ivan from Kristeva’s novel) in the group of the leading specialists in literature and thinkers of today’s modern world. Just this work positioned him on the post of a director of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). In France only a man who has already obliged not only its culture but also the culture of the world can hope to be granted such a title – recognition. Or, said in a picturesque manner: a man who knows to swim not only persistently and well, but possesses an inexhaustible (gigantic) energy that secures him at the surface of the turbulent, seething sea of French culture, replete with underwater reefs and insatiable intellectual sharks.
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4. Macedonian edition in two volumes. – Skopje, Detska Radost 1994 (translation and foreword A. Vangelov)
5. Todorov, Poétique, 29.
6. Emile Beenvenist: Sémiologie de la langue in Problème de la linguistique générale 2. – Paris, Gallimard/TEL 1989, 43 – 66.
7. or: intentio scriptoris (=writer), intentio lectoris (=writer) I intentio operis (= work), told with Umberto Ecco’s technical language (Les limites de l’interpretation. – Paris, Grasset 1992, 29-32.