Performing Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture

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Is it possible today to understand current genres such as drama and theater without considering the influence of television? Elizabeth Klaver argues that television’s dominance of the entertainment industry demands a continual negotiation of subject position from all other cultural forms and institutions. By examining plays that incorporate televisual discourse-from cameras and monitors to televisual style and structure-Performing Television probes the turbulent relation contemporary drama has had to television and its negotiations for identity in a postmodern media culture.
Klaver applies post-structuralist theories of subjectivity to drama while ranging through Beckett’s plays, National Hockey League games, The Tonight Show, gay and lesbian drama, minority drama, avant-garde performance, and the topics of theatrical paranoia, the mediatized Imaginary, and the spectatorial gaze.