Dr. Herman Rapaport
Reynolds Professor of English
Contact
Office: C109 Tribble Hall
Email: rapapoh@wfu.edu
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
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
“Fantasies of Settlement” in Modern Fiction Studies (2017). Includes discussion of Wm. Faulkner
“Marc Redfield: Theory at Yale,” Oxford Literary Review (2017).
“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.
“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.
“The Ethical Break,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Culture. On Marguerite Duras’ La douleur and other figures.
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.
Forthcoming: Introduction to a special issue on Derrida’s seminars. In Poetics Today.
In preparation: “Roland Barthes and Don DeLillo on Living Apart/Together” for a book on Barthes’ writings. This piece concerns Barthes’ seminar on how to live together, which I’ve applied to DeLillo’s novel, Falling Man.
I’m writing a short introduction to English Studies.