Seven basic stories

Partly inspired by catching the first part of an interview with Christopher Booker on the wireless this morning, I stumbled across this delightfully jovial exploration of just how many plots there are. One phrase in particular amused me, as the author works his way down to see just how few archetypal stories one might identify:

One school of thought holds that all stories can be summed up as Exposition/Rising Action/Climax/Falling Action/Denouement or to simplify it even further, Stuff Happens, although even at this level of generality we seem to have left out Proust.

Quite.