ABSTRACT
A longstanding discussion within the humanities has been whether culture is shaped by universal laws and perennial ideas, or whether it is in fact strongly historical. A central issue for both views has been language. In the heyday of Structuralism in the 1960s scholars such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Algirdas Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette tried to find universal grammars and universal discursive features in storytelling and mythmaking. The structuralist endeavor was in several respects fruitful, providing some basic tools to describe narratives. However, its language-based idea of grammar-like linguistic structures at the basis of storytelling was – in hindsight – problematic because it prevented structuralists from trying to look for those brain structures, those basic mental mechanisms, that support and mould the narrative “grammars.” Structuralism was inspired by the cognitive revolution that began in the 1950s (with Chomsky and others) but missed the later cognitive and neurological breakthroughs since the 1970s.
