Drama between literature and theatre

The article considers some reasons for why drama, once the privileged form of theoretical poetics, has been moved to its periphery in the 20th century. One of the reasons turns out to be synthetic nature of drama as an intermediary between literature and theatre which lacks its own medium, while the modernist art gravitates towards medium specificity. In literature it manifests in the coming to the fore of lyrical poetry, a form most closely connected to language, while drama as a form of narrative fiction turns out to be a little sister of prose. In theatre search processes for the specifically theatrical has lead to the birth of postdramatic theatre free form literary-centricity. Because of this, it is possible to compare the fate of drama to the fate of irony in rhetoric: both fell victims to the tendencies towards reductionism, pursuit of purity in theory and in arts. Two “pure” tropes became connected to two “pure” literary forms at the expense of exclusion of not so “pure” irony and drama.