Frameworks

17 of 17 frameworks

#	Framework	Type	Description	Works
1	Todorov's Equilibrium Model	Core	Tracks the five-stage cycle from stable world → disruption → recognition → attempted repair → new equilibrium. Reveals how stories break and rebuild their status quo.	174
2	The Freytag Pyramid	Core	Maps the shape of dramatic tension: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement. Shows where a story peaks and how quickly it resolves.	174
3	The Three-Act Structure	Core	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.	174
4	Genette's Narrative Discourse	Core	Analyzes how a story is told rather than what happens: temporal order (flashbacks, prolepsis), duration (scene vs. summary), and focalization (who perceives).	174
5	The Monomyth / Hero's Journey	Core	Campbell's departure → initiation → return template. Tracks whether a protagonist follows, subverts, or refuses the archetypal journey pattern.	174
6	Dan Harmon's Story Circle	Core	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.	174
7	Save the Cat! Beat Sheet	Core	Snyder's 15-beat commercial screenplay structure. Measures pacing against the expected beat timing — where the story conforms and where it deviates.	174
8	Actantial Model (Greimas)	Core	Structural semiotics: maps six roles (Subject, Object, Sender, Receiver, Helper, Opponent) to reveal the underlying power dynamics and desire structures driving the plot.	174
9	Protocol Fiction Mapping	Extension	Reads fiction as a stress test for real-world systems: what rule governs the world, how does it fail, and what human insight emerges from the failure?	174
10	Propp's Morphology of the Folktale	Extension	Identifies which of Propp's 31 narrative functions (villainy, departure, donor, transfiguration, etc.) appear. Best for quest and adventure structures.	174
11	Kishōtenketsu (Four-Act Structure)	Extension	East Asian four-act structure without conflict as engine: introduction (ki), development (shō), unexpected twist (ten), and reconciliation (ketsu).	152
12	Lévi-Strauss's Binary Oppositions	Extension	Maps the fundamental conceptual conflicts (Nature/Culture, Individual/Collective, Human/Alien) and identifies mediating elements that bridge or collapse the binary.	112
13	Cognitive Estrangement	Extension	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.	134
14	Bakhtin's Chronotope	Extension	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.	134
15	Aristotelian Poetics	Extension	The original framework for tragedy: hamartia (the fatal flaw), peripeteia (the reversal of fortune), and anagnorisis (the moment of recognition). Maps downfall arcs.	134
16	Jungian Archetypal Analysis	Extension	Reads characters as psychological archetypes — the Persona (social mask), the Shadow (repressed self), the Anima/Animus (contrasexual), and the Trickster (agent of change).	134
17	Genette's Transtextuality	Extension	Measures how a text depends on other texts: direct quotation and allusion (intertextuality), framing devices like titles and footnotes (paratextuality), and critical commentary (metatextuality).	134