One of my favourite reads of last year was Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970). It introduced me to a whole range of primarily French 19th century literature and its dissection of genre is one of the best you’ll find anywhere. The book has its shortcomings too, but these have more to do with the tautological nature of genre construction which is inherent in the notion of genre itself (see here).

I also read Borges’s The Book of Sand last year and I am currently re-reading it. Borges is a master of mixing the real with the imaginary and I was surprised to find no mention of Borges in The Fantastic.

So I did a search for Borges+Todorov and stumbled on this article by Lew on the excellent Depauw website where I had spent time before. From Lew’s assessment of Todorov’s book, the keyword is “sample”:

Since structuralism in literary studies is largely of French origin, this attempt to ruin its reputation takes as its motto the words of a Frenchman, Pierre Bertaux: “At one time it was hoped that the beginnings of a formalization of the humanities analogous [to that of the sciences] could be expected from structuralism. Unfortunately, it appears today that precisely the loudest advocates of structuralism have let it degenerate into a mythology—and not even a useful one.” I fully agree with this verdict. However, inasmuch as it is difficult to expose in a single article the barrenness of a whole school of thought—one moreover which has spawned divergent tendencies, since every author has his own “vision” of the subject—I will limit myself to dissecting Tzvetan Todorov’s book The Fantastic. The author begins by deriding the investigator who would, before proceeding to description of a genre, engage in endless reading of actual works. Todorov’s “sample” of works discussed, as displayed in his bibliography, is astonishing. Among its twenty-seven titles we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy: all of SF is represented by two short stories. We get, instead, E.T.A. Hoffman, Potocki, Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka—and that is about all. What this structural account proclaims to us as the bounds of the fantastic is really quite an antique piece of furniture: the bed of Procrustes. –Stanislaw Lem via http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/4/lem4art.htm [Jan 2007]