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I started Thomas Thompson's Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel. On the back cover, I read the following summary of the book:
"In this radical study, comparable to his work on The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, Thompson provides a large-scale alternative to the documentary hypothesis. Rather than the model of a set of discrete and lengthy 'sources' for narratives he identifies a structure, which he calls 'the traditional complex chain narrative', which bind together the material of Genesis and Exodus 1-23."
On pages 62-64, Thompson introduces this method. According to Thompson, there are three, and sometimes four, levels of tradition. First, there are the "Smaller Units and Tales". Thompson states that "They are distinctive units of tradition in that they have their own plot-line, theme, and recognizable beginning and ending, which are separable and distinct from those of their greater narrative context." Thompson makes the point that these units can be "very short, even a verse or two", or "quite extensive, a chapter or more in length." On this, Thompson diverges from the customary traditio-critical method, which relied on Olrik's characterization of early oral traditions---as short and with a few characters. Thompson appears to agree with Olrik that the independent units are self-contained, but he does not think that they have to be short and limited in their number of characters.
Moreover, Thompson doesn't seem to see traditio-criticism as a way to arrive at the historical events underneath the stories, as if oral traditions were ancient and were faithfully handed down from generation to generation. On page 43, he refers to the study of Walter Anderson of the "redaction of the story of King John and the Bishop". Anderson identified "as many as 18 separate recensions of this one tale", and his study was "based on approximately 600 oral variants and 151 distinct literary versions of the tale." If there are so many oral variants of a tradition, Thompson wonders, how can we be so confident that we can arrive at the earliest oral tradition---the one closest to the historical event? But Thompson does overlap with traditio-criticism in that he acknowledges the existence of independent units, which were tied together into a larger narrative by means of redaction.
Second, there are "Larger, Compound Tales". At this stage, the smaller units have been combined into compound tales, which appear to be self-contained. Examples of these compound tales that Thompson mentions include: "the wandering of Abraham, Abraham and Lot, Abraham and Ishmael[,] Abraham and Isaac[, t]he Jacob-Esau Conflict story, [and] the Jacob-Laban narrative." These compound tales are then linked together. For example, Thompson states on page 90 that Genesis 17 is a bridge between the Abraham and Ishmael story, and the Abraham and Isaac story.
Third, there is the "Traditional Complex-Chain Narrative". These are even larger units, and chain narratives include that of Abraham, of Jacob, of Joseph, of the Exodus, and of the Torah in the Book of Exodus. Thompson states that "Chain narratives are not merely composite narratives", but "are long discursive narrative chains which typically have an historiographic appearance." Thompson boldly declares that "The affirmation of their existence is a refutation of the documentary hypothesis." Why? Because Thompson offers a model for the emergence of the Pentateuch that does not posit the sources of J and E, for it entails the combination of independent traditions (which could be by anyone) into larger units. As Thompson acknowledges, however, there have been traditio-critics who have tried to have their cake and eat it too, such as Martin Noth, who believed in independent units but also J, E, and P.
Fourth, there is the "Toledoth Structure". The toledoth are genealogies, and they are used to connect the chain narratives into the unit of Genesis-Exodus 23, which functions as an "account of Israel's origin."
