The thesis offers a study of the poetics of event in contemporary French drama. The research made it possible to verify the expediency of applying the category of "event" to the analysis of a dramatic text. Critical evaluation of an array of theoretical publications enabled the working definition of event as relative sense constructed on the basis of subjective interpretation of renewed order of things. Within the framework of the relevant cultural context the research relies upon theater semiotics as its underpinning methodology taking into account the theater's comprehensive nature as a specific art combining literary text and its stage production, as well as the primacy of sign in event formation. Contrary to media representation of events, the theater offers their subtler interpretation so that they might constitute a part of the audience's personal experiences. As B.-M.Koltеs' and F.Minyana's plays testify, French dramatic texts of the 1980s - 1990s are based both on historical events and incidents borrowed from mass media "black" chronicles. Both varieties of events are treated through the prism of the characters' private emotions. Spatial characteristics of the plays under consideration confirm the hypothesis about the emergence of "drama of life" as opposed to "drama in life", with their characters moving to the margins of imaginary spaces or wandering perennially without a destination. Natural or urban wilderness is contrasted to carefully laid out urban space, which intensifies immersion into the character's inner world. Temporal organization of B.-M. Koltеs' and F. Minyana's drama was studied drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's theory of event distinguishing between two temporal planes in an event's formation - Chronos and Aeon. According to the research data, both dramatists tend to focus not on the fact, but on the process of the event's sense formation. The interaction between two temporal planes serves to visualize what is happening to the characters as an internal experience. Transformations of temporal and spatial parameters affect communicative mechanisms operating in the plays. B.-M. Koltes develops in his drama a special kind of character presented as the subject of silencing suppression. F. Minyana, in his turn, offers a different type of communicative model delineating several parallel plot lines and modeling his discourse of event as polycentric and polyphonic. Passing over to speech characteristics in B.-M. Koltes' and F. Minyana's drama, it is noteworthy that the former is prone to centralize the soliloquy, while the latter prioritizes dialogue. Concurrently, the communication crisis modifies the structure of dramatic dialogue, which is losing its coherence and cogency. Unlike B.-M. Koltes' interest in interpersonal communication, F. Minyana concentrates more on individual perception of the event. His characters are presented as human beings shaped by means of articulating their feelings and reminiscences. Theoreticians define this type of drama as "theatre of voices" as it concentrates not only on the text itself, but also on such aspects of actors' presence as timbre, loudness, amplitude, intonation, accents and pauses. F. Minyana's "theater of voices" is marked by a considerable number of characters, episodic structure, quotations from epistles, diaries, songs incorporated into the monologues, lengthy stage directions, and attention to the texts' phonetic and syntactic features. To sum up, the dissertation offers generalization of various approaches to the category of event in the context of cultural practices and theoretical tenets worked out in recent humanities studies. It also discusses specific features of B.-M. Koltes' and F.Minyana's idiosyncratic styles, and opens up new prospects for further insights into the poetics of event in literature and, particularly, in drama.
