GENRE AND STYLE DISPOSITION OF METADRAMA

Abstract

The article deals with the genesis of metadramatic poetics due to the evolution of the dramatic genre in the historical and cultural aspects. It is traced the general chronology of replenishment of metadramatic techniques. It is proved that, despite the continuity of the metadramatic tradition, its form has undergone a significant conceptualization in the twentieth century and became a total sign of postmodern drama.
Metadrama represents the self-reflexive intentions of a play, its, intertextual and cross-cultural potential. The theatre as a part of a drama poetics confirms the conventionality of the world.
Antique metadrama was realized due to drama’s close connection with myths and rituals, and involved a part of the audience into the stage action. In Renaissance, the play-within-the-play became the basis of metadramatic poetics. Syncretism of baroque drama was largely based on metadramatic essentially interlaced interludes. The aesthetics of classicism limited forms of metadrama, but at the same time gave an opportunity for the development of its invariants in parody genres, as well as in rehearsals. Motifes of dream, illusion, mystery became important for of romantic metadrama. Despite the natural conflict of metadramatic form with the aesthetics of realism, this epoch influenced the formation of anti-theatrical rhetoric within dramatic texts, which became the basis of the metacritical discourse of drama in twentieth century. Conceptualization of metadrama at various levels increased in literature of modernism with its inherent gaming nature. In general, writers of the twentieth century creatively used the full potential of metadrama experience of the past. The total use of metadramatic forms and techniques by avant-garde writers and postmodernists predetermines the deepening of researching of metadrama and comprehending its numerous models.