Tracks the five-stage cycle from stable world → disruption → recognition → attempted repair → new equilibrium. Reveals how stories break and rebuild their status quo.
Maps the shape of dramatic tension: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement. Shows where a story peaks and how quickly it resolves.
Identifies the two major turning points (end of Act I, end of Act II) that divide setup, confrontation, and resolution. The backbone of commercial storytelling.
Analyzes how a story is told rather than what happens: temporal order (flashbacks, prolepsis), duration (scene vs. summary), and focalization (who perceives).
Eight-step cycle: a character in comfort, wants something, enters unfamiliar territory, adapts, gets what they wanted, pays a price, returns changed. Focus on what's sacrificed.
Structural semiotics: maps six roles (Subject, Object, Sender, Receiver, Helper, Opponent) to reveal the underlying power dynamics and desire structures driving the plot.
Identifies which of Propp's 31 narrative functions (villainy, departure, donor, transfiguration, etc.) appear. Best for quest and adventure structures.
Maps the fundamental conceptual conflicts (Nature/Culture, Individual/Collective, Human/Alien) and identifies mediating elements that bridge or collapse the binary.
Suvin's framework for speculative fiction: identifies the familiar concept being defamiliarized, the estranging mechanism (novum), and the cognitive shift it produces in the reader.
Analyzes how time and space fuse into a single narrative logic — the road, the threshold, the ruin. Essential for texts where the world itself functions as a character.
The original framework for tragedy: hamartia (the fatal flaw), peripeteia (the reversal of fortune), and anagnorisis (the moment of recognition). Maps downfall arcs.
Reads characters as psychological archetypes — the Persona (social mask), the Shadow (repressed self), the Anima/Animus (contrasexual), and the Trickster (agent of change).
Measures how a text depends on other texts: direct quotation and allusion (intertextuality), framing devices like titles and footnotes (paratextuality), and critical commentary (metatextuality).