Literary Mode: Literary experience is mediated by a mode of neural activity in which one’s primary attention is removed form the external world and invested in the text. The properties of literary works are fitted to that mode of activity.
Extralinguistic Grounding: Literary language is linked to extralinguistic sensory and motor schemas in a way that is essential to literary experience.
Form: The form of a given work can be said to be a computational structure.
Sharability: That computational form is the same for all competent readers.
Character as Computational Unit: Individual characters can be treated as unified computational units in some, but not necessarily all, literary forms.
Armature Invariance: The relationships between the entities in the armature of a literary work are the same for all readers.
Elasticity: The meaning of literary works is elastic and can readily accommodate differences in expressive detail and differences among individuals.
Increasing Formal Sophistication: The long-term course of literary history has been toward forms of increasing sophistication.
Ranks: Over the long-term literary history has so far evolved forms at four successive cognitive ranks. These are correlated with a richer and more flexible construction of the self.
It does seem like this post is successfully working towards a mathematical model of narrative structure, with LLMs as a test bed.
YES!
Since structuralist narratology is on the table, you might what to check out what Lévi-Strauss did in The Raw and the Cooked, where he was inspired by algebraic group theory. I discuss that in a working paper: Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition, where I also discuss the work Margaret Masterman did on haiku in the Ancient Days. There was a lot of work on story grammars in the 1980s or so and some of that is continuing, especially in the video games world. I have proposed: Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form (Version 4). The propositions:
Literary Mode: Literary experience is mediated by a mode of neural activity in which one’s primary attention is removed form the external world and invested in the text. The properties of literary works are fitted to that mode of activity.
Extralinguistic Grounding: Literary language is linked to extralinguistic sensory and motor schemas in a way that is essential to literary experience.
Form: The form of a given work can be said to be a computational structure.
Sharability: That computational form is the same for all competent readers.
Character as Computational Unit: Individual characters can be treated as unified computational units in some, but not necessarily all, literary forms.
Armature Invariance: The relationships between the entities in the armature of a literary work are the same for all readers.
Elasticity: The meaning of literary works is elastic and can readily accommodate differences in expressive detail and differences among individuals.
Increasing Formal Sophistication: The long-term course of literary history has been toward forms of increasing sophistication.
Ranks: Over the long-term literary history has so far evolved forms at four successive cognitive ranks. These are correlated with a richer and more flexible construction of the self.