Gretchen Flesher Moon

I teach courses that are mostly about writing (English 137W Writing Workshop, English 242W The Essay, for example), courses mostly about literature (English 340 Chaucer, English 341 Shakespeare, for example), and courses that balance somewhere between (English 201 Critical Reading and Writing, a College Colloquium on Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example). My chief aim in teaching, no matter what the course, is to increase my students' confidence in their abilities to pose problems and solve problems using the various practices of academic inquiry: reading, writing, discussion, inquiry, research, and reasoning; and to simultaneously decrease their confidence that they know much that should not be subject to further inquiry. I am content, that is, to let most students go on knowing that their parents love them. I am not content for them to go on believing that Shakespeare's primacy as an artist is a fact of nature rather than a social construct. Especially in my teaching of literature, I'm increasingly asking my students to push toward an additional layer of analysis: what forces are at work to make literatureï, and specific works of literature, culturally or politically or socially, or even personally, significant? I hope that, through my classes and all the others they take, students gain confidence both in assessing the likelihood that a given response to a problem (a theory, an essay in literary criticism, an editorial, an argument) is more or less valid than another and in predicting how and why a relatively satisfying response will, and should, itself be challenged.

In class sessions and paper assignments, I try to present problems to solve rather than material to absorb; I try to propose a variety of suggested approaches rather than to offer solutions. I try to encourage students' critique in discussion and writing; I try to support them in taking risks. In class, I try to balance large group discussion, in which I can more directly shape the direction and point out the kinds of intellectual moves discussion participants, including the authors of class texts, are making, with small group discussions that require students to work more independently. In all, I hope to share my passion for a life of intellectual engagement, to share books, to share the pleasure of writing and of conversation. I hold high standards for my students and I take joy in the many ways they meet those standards.

Interests

Chaucer and Shakespeare; Autobiography; Women's Overland Trail Diaries; History of Composition; Memory