Are There Only Six Story Plots in the World?
[image error]The Plot of Romeo and Juliette
This morning, I read on the BBC news site that Professor Matthew Jockers of the University of Nebraska, used text-mining techniques on 1,700 classics in order to determine if there are any patterns.
According to his research, he discovered that there are only 6 story lines in everything from The Divine Comedy to Pride and Prejudice. The archetypes include themes like ‘rags to riches’ and something called ‘man in a hole’.
In order to determine what category these stories fell into, researchers assigned words a ‘sentiment score’ then plotted the data over the timeline of the book. The results were quite interesting.
Because of the variety of stories, I’m not sure if I believe that all of literature can be boiled down into six story types. Then again, there are only twenty-six letters in the English language. So who knows…
