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Spectatorial Theory in the Age of Media Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Elizabeth Klaver
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Abstract

The last few decades of the twentieth century have seen the rise of a significant and powerful media culture. We now live in an age in which those media forces associated with visual entertainment – film, theatre, and television – have come increasingly to circulate among and interact with each other. Given the consequently porous nature of media boundaries, how should viewership and its effect on subjectivity be theorized today? Does the concept of the ‘spectatorial gaze’, as developed by critics in film and extended to theatre and television, actually work, given the plurality of the media culture? Elizabeth Klaver argues in the following essay that the ‘ways of looking’ currently available to viewers break down the isolated gaze of mastery – with or without its sexual-political connotations – and offer instead the potential and sometimes the actuality of performative interaction. Elizabeth Klaver is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. As part of her current work on the media culture, she has recently published in the field of television and contemporary drama, and has also published articles on Beckett and Ionesco.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 44 , November 1995 , pp. 309 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes and References

An earlier version of this paper was read at the ‘Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative’ conference, University of California, Riverside, February 1993.

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