Tzvetan Todorov

Tzvetan Todorov , born on March 1st, 1939 with Sofia in Bulgaria, is a semiologist, a linguist, historian of the ideas, and a Philosophe French of Bulgarian origin.

Biography

Born in a family from librarians of Sofia, in Bulgaria, he flees Communism in the years 1950 and follows studies to Paris. Having acquired French nationality, it directs since 1987 the Research center on arts and the language of CNRS, where it started to work starting from 1968.

Initially theorist of the literature, it devotes himself since the years 1990 to the history and the report/ratio to the other within historical frameworks as hard as the conquest of the Central America or the Second world war.

Tzvetan Todorov is initially noticed for its translation of the Formalistes Russian, which largely contributed to the diffusion of the contemporary Poétique. Its test Literature and significance did of him one of the pioneers of the rebirth of the Rhétorique; in its Introduction to the fantastic literature (1970), it analyzes as a semiologist the fantastic Littérature.

The reflections of Todorov relate mainly on the Altérité and in particular to the question of “us” and “others” in the discussions of the humanistic to Europe at the time of the discovered New World and during the process of Colonisation.

Its analysis of the regard falls under an anthropological step at the same time and sociological. He discusses again the work of Machiavel and Hobbes, not seeing the community more as an intrinsically bad organization to which the man sticks only by weakness, but like a need for the fact, according to him, of the need for regard of the man, enraciné in his Psychisme. This design is resulting from the psychoanalysis and interpretations of the work of Hegel by Kojève.

Tzvetan Todorov holds of the conferences in the large American universities: with New York, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and the university of California.

He is the companion of Nancy Huston.

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