ABSTRACT
Modern theatre, as Peter Szondi observed, already substantially negated the outmoded model of drama in important aspects. This then posed the question: And what is taking its place? Szondi’s classical response was to theorize the new forms of texts that had emerged from what he described as the ‘crisis of drama’ as variants of an ‘epicization’, thus turning the epic theatre into a kind of universal key for understanding the recent developments. This answer can no longer suffice. Faced with the new tendencies of dramatic writing since 1880, which he reflects upon in terms of a form-content dialectic, Szondi’s sweeping Theory of the Modern Drama contrasts the model of the ideal ‘pure drama’ with one particular counter-tendency. Almost without explanation, based only on his recourse to the classical opposition of epic and dramatic representation in Goethe and Schiller, Szondi says right at the beginning:
Since modern theatrical works develop out of and away from the Drama itself, this development must be considered with the help of a contrasting concept: ‘Epic’ will serve here. It designates a common structural characteristic of the epos, the story, the novel, and other genres – namely, the presence of that which has been referred to as the ‘subject of the epic form’ or the ‘epic I ’.1
