Eu não conheço esse aqui pessoalmente, mas vou fazer uma suposição com base nas pistas que você me deu: "A Geometria da Narrativa", de Hilbert Schenck, que, de acordo com o ISFDB , apareceu na edição de agosto de 1983 da Analog e foi um candidato ao Prêmio Hugo no ano seguinte.
Como o único resumo on-line, encontrei frases:
This story begins with a character who is a graduate student of English proposing to his professor a new geometric approach to literary analysis. As he points out, this has been used to some limited degree in the past: merely the one dimensional geometry of a story as a line segment representing linear passage of time, or the planar graph of the "arc" of the storyline building to a local maximum at the climax. However, in the story, the character proposes applications of higher dimensional geometry (and more complicated topologies as well). In particular, he discusses the role of the tesseract in analyzing Hamlet, and is ready with an example when his professor challenges him to apply the topology of the Möbius strip to literature.