T HE RISE OF SEMIOTICS in the early sixties, like that of general linguistics, corresponded in part to a need of students to challenge pervasive models of a historicism (inherent in the structure of the university itself as a product of romantic culture) whose teleology could not be dissociated from such events of recent history as World War II. The semioticians' search for universals was not only transhistorical, but transcultural. The novelty and technicity of semiotic discourse fostered the illusion that semioticians could elude the determinations of national language, culture, and epoch, and unite in a new order of understanding. Perhaps during the Middle Ages, at a time when theories of sign and meaning preoccupied the best minds of Europe, such scholastics as Peter of Spain, John Duns Scotus, and Gregory of Rimini experienced a similar excitement as they convened in Paris or wandered from center to center. The modern semioticians' yearnings for transhistoricity-and even for a certain permanence-have been frowned on by Clio. As he published Du sens II, A. J. Greimas pondered the paradox of the simultaneous desire for permanence and the commitment to progress.' Since 1970, the narrow path of semiotic thought, Greimas says, has not only been challenged by its own progress, but distracted by a philosophical and ideological ambient episteme that has constantly displaced the topics of interrogation and transformed the status of its most assured formulations (7). Greimas nonetheless clings to the specificity of his own semiotics as a discipline. He continues to insist on the constitutive role of the semiotic square in all semantic processes, on the primacy of modals to the syntax of stories, and on the adequacy of the Greimassian actantial model to decode the syntactic operations of any message or discourse. Thus, Greimassian semiotics, or what some still call the Parisian school, is still alive, though more in diaspora than in Paris itself. Moreover, an enduring principle of Greimassian lucidity is its antihistoricism: not a refusal to deal with material from earlier ep