Todorov’s fantastic from a Benjaminian’s point of view

Abstract

As Tzvetan Todorov (1970, p. 165) says in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique, the fantastic “is based essentially on a hesitation of the reader – the reader that identifies himself with the main character – about the nature of a strange event”. Considering this, my paper aims to observe how the concept of fantastic showed by the Bulgarian thinker can be articulated with the conception of art criticism exposed by Walter Benjamin (2010a) in his text entitled “Goethe’s elective affinities”. Ultimately I would like to think if the moment of hesitation, essential for the existence of the fantastic, may also be fundamental to make possible the existence of the critique of a specific work of art.