Hermann is a 1973 graduate of the
University of Illinois, and became professor of
Old English language and literature at the
University of Alabama in 1974, where he spent his entire academic career. With his colleague John Burke he edited a volume on
Geoffrey Chaucer, the proceedings of a 1977 conference held at the University of Alabama (''Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry
, 1981), and he wrote a monograph on spiritual warfare in religious Old English poetry (Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry
, 1989). A former track athlete, he was an adjunct track coach for the university. which has drawn national attention for its long history of de facto'' segregation. Hermann considers the Greek system as profiting from "taxpayer-supported segregation". In 1991, he headed one of the committees charged with establishing an accreditation system for the university's fraternities and sororities; the new guidelines charged the organizations with helping to strive toward a more diverse campus, though Hermann's committee had called for stronger language: "white Greek chapters must admit black and international members and vice versa". By 2001, however,
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education concluded that the guidelines had achieved nothing, and that not a single black student had ever been accepted by a white fraternity or sorority (there had been "a few white members" in black fraternities, it noted). Hermann, disappointed by what he perceived as inaction on the part of university president
Andrew Sorensen, was prepared to go to court in a civil suit, and called on the university that they demand that white Greek organizations "accept a black member or be told to leave the university grounds" (the article noted that the Greek houses occupy university-owned land, which they rented for $100 per year—an annual "fair market rental value" for the real estate would add up to $600,000).
Allegories of War Allegories of War was Hermann's doctoral dissertation, and chapters of it were published as articles before the book was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1989. Taking the concept of psychomachia, "literature based on the premise of personified abstractions in combat", in such texts as
Elene,
Andreas, and
Judith.
Psychoanalysis and
postmodern theory (including the work of
Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan) are combined to bear on literary texts and the history that produced them. In
Judith, for instance, Hermann reads the decapitation of
Holofernes not just as a symbolic castration but also allegorically, as Christian abnegation of the self, but also tropologically, as signifying the disciplining of especially sexual desire within a group, a notion he relates to the poem's monastic provenance. Hermann's critique of "previous allegorical approaches" is still cited in Old English studies. In addition, Hermann takes aim at the reigning methods in Old English scholarship of the time, especially
exegesis and the
New Criticism, by examining the "sublation", his translation of the
Hegelian term
Aufhebung, the "subsuming of one term in a binary pair (devil/church, foreign evil/soldier of Christ) by the other in an operation that both negates and conserves the former (suppressed) concept". One of the goals of his analysis is to uncover the literal violence sublated in the poetic accounts of spiritual warfare: "in Hermann's view, traditional exegetical and formalist readings have had the effect of obscuring a real (and reprehensible) commitment to violence and terror as instruments of forced cultural conversion in the early Middle Ages". The book received very mixed reviews. Joseph Harris, in a review for
Speculum, was not convinced by its supposed "efforts at a high-level Marxist historical analysis" and thought its deconstructionist theme "least satisfactory". Martin Irvine, in the
South Atlantic Review, called it "an important contribution to current discussions of theory and method in Old English studies", to be read "profitably alongside other recent studies on Old English literature and critical practices by scholars such as
Gillian Overing and
Allen Frantzen". ==References==