Since the explosion of narrative theory in the sixties and seventies, narrative as a concept has become both a key explanatory category in non-literary disciplines and an object of study by non-literary disciplines. Nowhere has the intersection of narrative and non-literary disciplines been more intriguing than in the closely related realms of cognitive science and evolutionary theory. In this panel we will feature two important thinkers--one a psychologist working directly with narrative, one a literary scholar working directly with cognitive psychology--both of whom have published books bringing together narrative and cognitive science. Their papers will give us specific, substantive examples of the kinds of claims that are being made about narrative from a cognitive scientific understanding. Our other two papers--by interested literary scholars who are not working with the science itself--will consider the interdisciplinary issues that arise when we bring narrative, cognitive theory, and evolutionary theory together. So we will have both examples of the interdisciplinary practice itself and meta-level considerations of the nature and problems of the interdisciplinary practice. The panel should be interesting to those students of narrative who are already involved with cognitive science and evolutionary theory, to those interested in interdisciplinary uses of narrative in general, and especially to those who have heard rumblings about cognitive science and evolutionary theory and want to know what all the fuss is about.