Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Structural Analysis of Narrative"
"The nature of structural analysis will be essentially theoretical and non-descriptive; in other words, the aim of such a study will never be the description of a concrete work. The work will be considered as the manifestation of an abstract structure, merely one of its possible realizations; an understanding of that structure will be the real goal of structural analysis."
A structural literary critic isn't interested in describing a work of literature. Heaven forbid! What he or she is interested in is understanding how that work reflects a deep, underlying structure. So we only care about the characteristics of a specific text insofar as they tell us something about that deep structure, which should be applicable to all literature, everywhere. Other texts will also reflect that deep structure, but maybe in other ways. The critic's job is to find how each work reflects that deep structure.
Todorov is clarifying the goal of a structural literary critic: to identify and analyze the deep structure of a literary work. Let's say we're studying a novel, for example. We can describe what the novel's about: a woman goes on a "quest" to find her missing children during a war. Well, says Todorov, that description is useless. There's no point if it doesn't tell us anything about how novels, as a group of narratives, are structured. If we say what the novel is about, on the other hand, and then point out that the "quest" plot of the novel is one that can be found in lots of other novels, then we're doing our job as literary theorists.
What's important about this is that Todorov is tossing a whole bunch of conventional ideas that had dominated literary criticism up to that point into the trash bin. Describing a work—what it's about, what it means, how it gets that meaning across—was exactly what the New Critics before the structuralists aimed to do, for instance. They weren't interested in how the structure of one work was reflected in other works; they just cared about how one text created its meaning. But Todorov rebutted that treating a text in this way was a limited form of analysis. We can't actually understand a text unless we understand what it's telling us beyond itself, and that means getting at a structure that is not only inside the text but outside it as well.