Russian Formalism is the school of literary analysis that tries to assign universal forms to the stories that are written at all times and in all genres of human art. An example of the same sort of idea is found in the book Hero of a Thousand Faces in which the hero mythos of many cultures are related back to a meta-myth or mono-myth that is said to stem from the Collective Unconscious.
Theories on the origins of these forms vary. In Hero of a Thousand Faces the reason was the Collective Unconscious, but in other writers opinons the sources vary.
An achievment of this school of thought was a flow chart that was come up with in relation to the James Bond films. This flow chart was able to represent the plot of every James Bond movie within itself by way of a series of steps taht actually applied to each film that was made.