The study of literary systems has no canon yet. There is nowhere to turn to find a listing of the literary forms that service certain systems. But the impulse to name and order the latent forms is present in many fields, and there are several authors who have put forth a group of literary forms as a part of their theories.
Spencer Ladd gave a lecture at RISD, where he spoke about the rhetorical devices of the image. He named a group of forms, mostly taken from traditional literature, that also have strong effects in the visual realm. They are:
Simile, Allegory, Hyperbole, Metaphor, Paradox, Paralipsis, Syllepsis, Metonomy, Meiosis.
In
Image—Music—Text, Roland Barthes outlines a method for the "structural analysis of narratives." He's searching for a deductive theory, a general model that he can apply to narratives to diverse types. His original outline includes what would seem to be several literary forms, employed by Barthes for their specific roles in the construction of narrative meaning. Among them are:
Cardinal Functions (or Nuclei), Indices (pointers to meaning), Catalyzers (functions that merely serve to fill space between nuclei), and Informants (immediately understandable information).
More traditional literary forms for novels come in the standard middle-school variety: Metaphor, Apostrophe, Hyperbole, Metonymy, Personification, Synecdoche, Innuendo, Irony,
and so on.
In the discipline of Computer Science, one of the most lasting and influential texts is an encyclopedia of literary forms for programmers. It's commonly called the "Gang of Four" after it's four authors, but
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software includes:
Abstract Factory, Builder, Prototype, Singleton, Bridge, Composite, Decorator, Facade, Proxy, Interpreter, Iterator, Memento, Observer, Visitor, and more.
Each of these forms is a common idiom, developed through extensive experience with developing object-oriented software, that helps to express the solution to a frequent problem. These are the cliches, if you will, of modern programming.
Every one of the above forms is an aid in particular situations, to convey certain complex meanings to the reader, through patterns which have been handed down and copied.
