With Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind, David Herman proposes a cross-fertilization
between the study of narrative and research on intelligent behavior. This cross-fertilization
goes beyond the simple importing of ideas from the sciences of mind into scholarship on
narrative and instead aims for convergence between work in narrative studies and research
in the cognitive sciences. The book as a whole centers on two questions: How do people
make sense of stories? And: How do people use stories to make sense of the world …

Research in the cognitive sciences, including fields such as psychology, linguistics, and the
philosophy of mind, can help foster the development of" postclassical" approaches to the
study of narrative. At issue are frameworks for narrative research that build on the work of
classical, structuralist narratologists but supplement that work with concepts and methods
that were unavailable to story analysts such as Roland Barthes, G6rard Genette, AJ
Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov during the heyday of the structuralist revolution.'One such …