an inexplicable event occurs -- "was it a trick of the senses, an undermining of self and perception but against the field of a world preserved, knowable, firm or did this thing really happen as perceived correctly by the sure senses and now the world, before so stable and natural-seeming, is now changed, undermined, devastated? How to decide? All is unsurety"
Brinkema says that "twentieth-century structuralism" is concerned with "the hesitation between the uncanny and the marvelous" that such situations invite
and that the period of hesitation is what Todorov dubs "the Fantastic" (7)
see separate note on this from McHale's Postmodern Fiction