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.