Dr. Faye Halpern
Positions
Associate Professor
Co-Editor, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature
Co-Editor
Book series, Theory and Interpretation of Narrative at The Ohio State University Press
Contact information
Phone number
Office: +1 (403) 220-4436
Location
Office: Social Sciences 1108
For media enquiries, contact
Preferred method of communication
Background
Educational Background
B.A. English and American Language & Literature, Harvard University, 1992
M.A., English, Brown University, 2005
Ph.D., English, Brown University, 2002
Research
Areas of Research
Participation in university strategic initiatives
Courses
| Course number | Course title | Semester |
|---|---|---|
| ARTS 601 | Theory & Practice of Teaching & Learning | Fall 2020 |
| ENGL 251 | How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse | Winter 2021 |
| ENGL 379 | American Slave Narratives: Then and Now | Fall 2021 |
| ENGL 607 | Unreliable Narrators and Narrative Ethics | Fall 2021 |
| ENGL 463 | American Literature from the Late 1800s to the Mid-1900s | Fall 2017 |
| ENGL 461 | Early American Literature and the American Renaissance | Fall 2018 |
| ENGL 605 | American Literary Realism | Winter 2017 |
Projects
The Afterlife of Sympathy: Reading Realism in the Wake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin makes two related arguments. First, it tells a new story about American literary realism. It challenges the traditional division in American literary history between realism, a postbellum genre celebrated for its bold and accurate depiction of the world, and antebellum sentimentality, a mode of writing associated with women, falsity, and excess emotionalism—“perfumed meretriciousness” as William Dean Howells characterized it. The Afterlife of Sympathy reveals that realists such as Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Charles Chesnutt used the sentimental techniques that they claimed to deplore and examines why they did so. It uncovers the wide range of uses realist authors found for sentimentality and demonstrates that we cannot fully understand their most famous novels and stories without understanding why they continued to rely on sentimental characters and scenes. Second, in exploding the myth of realism’s rejection of sentimentality, The Afterlife of Sympathy shows the continuing significance of sentimentality not just as a mode of writing but as a mode of reading. It identifies and explores an origin point for the split between readers that we find today: dispassionate academic readers, who are suspicious of empathy, and lay readers, who locate the value of reading in its cultivation of that quality.
Awards
- Insight Grant, SSHRC. 2019
Publications
- Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric. University of Iowa. (2013)
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