Is performing an autopsy on a dead body simply an objective, mutilating act – and a particularly powerful example of subject/object mastery? Demonstrating the intersection between scientific, medico-legal practice, and literary-artistic tropologies, Elizabeth Klaver explores in this essay the epistemological gaze of autopsy and its ironic effect on subjectivity through a variety of dramatic practices: Vesalius's Fabrica, the O. J. Simpson trial, and plays by Samuel Beckett. Elizabeth Klaver is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her book, Performing Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture is forthcoming from the Popular Press, and the present article will form part of her book in progress, Authorized Personnel Only: Sites of Autopsy in Postmodern Literature.

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.