Four Perspectives on Teaching Jeannette Walls’s Memoir, The Glass Castle
Keywords:
Women writers, common book, memoirAbstract
This essay suggests approaches to teaching a college-level Common Book, Jeannette Walls’s _The Glass Castle_, in a freshman seminar called “The Human Experience: Who Am I?.” The memoir proved to be an excellent fit with the course’s thematic approach to the self, and a range of approaches will help instructors and students approach Walls’s material. Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday,” from which she takes her epigraph, sparks extended literary comparison. The Walls family is considered in terms of depth psychology (particularly the dynamics of the shadow). An in-class exercise on literary formalism helps students unpack the memoir’s intricate themes and images. Ten topics suggest directions for a paper assignment, and the conclusion presents an in-class writing exercise to cap off a unit on the memoir. Overall, the essay is designed as a resource to aid instructors in constructing their own lesson plans on _The Glass Castle_.
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