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Dr. Herman Rapaport

Reynolds Professor of English

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Degrees

PhD University of California, Irvine (1978)

Areas of Interest

  • Early Modern Literature, Theatre and Performance Studies, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis
  • Member: Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas

Courses Taught at Wake Forest

  • Milton
  • Special Topics in Theatre
  • English Senior Capstone Course
  • Literary Criticism and Theory

Selected Publications

  • Forthcoming: Spivak Moving, a massive anthology of recent work by Gayatri Spivak edited by an editorial team of which I am a part (Seagull Press, India). Includes an interview we conducted with her, plus introductions to her pieces. 
  • Derrida on Exile and the Nation: Reading Fantom of the Other (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
  • The Literary Theory Toolkit (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
  • Later Derrida (Routledge, 2004)
  • The Theory Mess (Columbia UP, 2001)
  • Is There Truth in Art? (Cornell UP, 1998)
  • Between the Sign and the Gaze (Cornell, 1994)
  • Heidegger and Derrida (Nebraska UP, 1989)
  • Milton and the Postmodern (Nebraska UP, 1983)

Recent Articles

  • “Roland Barthes and Don DeLillo on Living Together/Apart,” in Understanding Barthes, Understanding Modernism, ed. J.R. DiLeo and Zahi Zalloua (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
  • “On Derrida’s Seminars,” Poetics Today (2022), ed. Adam Rosenthal.
  • “Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak” in Bloomsbury Handbook (2019).
  • “I Develop a Flame for the Bed: Walter Benjamin and Helene Cixous,” Symploke (Univ. Nebraska Press, 2019). Concerns Cixous’ memoir Hyperdream. 
  • “History, Poetry, and the Social Relation: Maya Angelou, Bruce Andrews, Claudia Rankine, Barrett Watten,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Culture (2018).
  • “Structuralism and Semiotics” in Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (2019). Concerns  concepts and major figures. 
  • “Fantasies of Settlement” in Modern Fiction Studies (2017). Includes discussion of Wm. Faulkner.
  • “Marc Redfield: Theory at Yale,” Oxford Literary Review (2017).
  • “The Ethical Break,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Culture. On Marguerite Duras’ La douleur and other figures. 
  • Forthcoming: A short introduction to English Studies.