To better understand avant-garde theater, cinema and the new electronic and digital art forms, we need to peer into the past, says Cornell University Professor of English Timothy Murray. By re-examining the representations of race, gender, sexuality and power in Shakespeare and other early modern works, we can understand the fascination of contemporary artists and playwrights with early modern theater and art.

In his new book, Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, and Art (Routledge, 1997 $14.99), Murray - a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow - draws from early modern studies, literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art and the studies of contemporary film, theater and electronic/digital art to glean insight into multifaceted artistic endeavors.

"By looking at the demeaning representation of women, sexuality and racialized differences in Shakespeare with our contemporary sensibilities to power and colonialism, for example, we can begin to understand our natural ambivalent relationship to our cultural legacy. These presentations are disturbing and upsetting on the one hand, but they are part of our compelling literary legacy that we so admire and that continues to have a profound impact on today's theatrical and video installations," said Murray, also the author of Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (1993) and editor of the new book Mimesis, Masochism, & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (University of Michigan Press, 1997, $49.50, paperback $21.95).

In Drama Trauma, Murray examines how Shakespearean drama set the stage for contemporary art's representation of psycho-social traumas involving race, gender, sex and power, as well as melancholy, deception, skepticism, masquerade and censorship.

With his NEH fellowship, Murray carries these examinations further in his current book project, tentatively titled Baroque Interface: Electronic Art, Utopic Vision, and Cultural Memory, which analyzes the interdisciplinary dialogue between recent video and digital installation art with Renaissance and Baroque visual sources and models.

"Although some critics argue that electronic art frees us from oppressive notions of gender and race and other stereotypes of the past, it's astonishing that every well-known electronic and video artist has created a major work that dialogues ambivalently with our cultural memory and the early modern past just when they could have ignored the 'Eurocentric' point of view," said Murray, who also is director of the new graduate program at Cornell in film and video. The program is available as a minor to give students a better appreciation of the role of video and the new technologies in the traditional humanities.

To convey these themes to undergraduate students, Murray teaches a variety of courses, including Video Baroque, which examines CD-ROMs, video, digital and other electronic art and their "curious attraction of looking to the early modern past"; Video Art, a survey of the past 25 years in artistic video of the type shown in museums; Theory of Cinema, which begins with the earliest films and ends with today's CD-ROMs; Shakespeare, which includes Shakespeare on film as well as examinations of tragedy and psychoanalysis; and Critical Surfing, a freshman writing seminar that examines cultural sites on the World Wide Web, including those pertaining to Shakespeare, digital art and even soap operas.

In his other new book, Mimesis, Masochism, & Mime, editor Murray has collected a set of essays that are primary sources in French philosophy and psychoanalysis and are frequently alluded to by contemporary artists working in theater, film and video.

"These 16 essays are the major works that provide us with a new way of understanding the history of the theater and the political importance of theatricality on theater, film, literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis," explained Murray. "These leading French thinkers, who are considered at the forefront of contemporary thought, examine the notion of imitation and masochism as they influence theater, art and philosophy through the ages. These essays also reflect on the societal and family tensions that dominate themes of art, theater and cinema."

Again, the book not only looks back to works by Sophocles, Shakespeare and Artaud but also to recent mixed-media performances from the European and North American stage and screen.

"My work attempts to encourage an active dialogue between the precedents in literature and the artistic canon (European tradition) and how they are summoned by avant-garde performers as a cultural tradition we might be wary of, yet can never forget," Murray concludes.