Dictionary of Narratology, and: Who Says This? The Authority of the Author, the Discourse, and the Reader (review)
"novel" should be replaced by the concept of "individuation"Â—"the process by which man, both as a species and as an individual becomes a unique personality and learns to relate to and interact with the environment, be it social or natural." Peavler understands individuation as the effect of "a dissident voice." Believing that the dialectic between the individual and the environment is the "parole" or deep structure that informs the novel as a genre, Peavler complains that the novel is often identified with its surface structure. Having defined individuation in his first chapter, he goes on to consider the relationship between the individual and society, the historical significance of individuality, the role of author of individuations as a dissident voice, and the incompatibility of the form with certain social and political conditions. The study seems to argue that the bildungsroman is the prototype of the novel, but Peavler remarks that this subgenre is "an application of the basic concept" of individuation. In other words, his abandoned New Critical formalism gives way in this work to the formalism of deep structure. Leonard Orr's Semiotic and Structuralist Analyses of Fiction: An Introduction and A Survey of Applications has a misleading title in that the book is an annotated bibliography rather than an introduction or a survey. The "Introduction: Great Signifying Unities of Discourse" does give a brief (twenty-six page) historical survey of structuralist/semiotic approaches to fiction. But the bulk of the work is a large and very useful annotated bibliography. It is divided into five categories: works which emphasize (1) definitions or principles, (2) codes, (3) linguistics, (4) typologies and morphologies, and (5) the role of the reader. An attractive aspect of the book is the glossary of terms at the end. The bibliography is indexed so that one does not have to guess the category in which a particular narratologist's work might be listed. The annotations for many of the major works (for example, Roland Barthes's S/Z) include citations of reviews or criticisms. There are occasional cross references. It is an excellent reference work for one's personal library.