Drama in the literary space: poetics restrained

The article considers the historic process in philosophy of art and in poetics which has led to the gradual extrusion of drama as a literary form from its central position in literary theory to its periphery. It is traced as a flip side of the process of entry of lyric poetry into the sphere of interest of poetics as it was studied by Gerard Genette in his “The Architext: An Introduction”. Since the moment when in romanticist aesthetics lyrical poetry started being acknowledged as one of the three literary forms alongside with epic and drama, the tendency towards reducing three forms to two categories has also started. Romantic tradition dealt with this problem dialectically, defining drama more often than not as a synthetic form of literature. However, this very synthetic nature of drama would then lead to the current situation. As two poetics, a thematic one and a formal one, were being developed in the 20th century, drama, which falls under both of them, will be left without poetics of its own. At the same time, as it is “narrative poetry” originally and thus restricted from both sides, drama is rarely able to provide interesting challenges to either of these poetics and is therefore able to become dominant in neither of them.