More Than Skin Deep: Reading Past Whiteness in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants ” 1 More Than Skin-Deep: Reading Past Whiteness in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants Laura Valeri Georgia Southern University lvaleri@georgiasouthern.edu Few are the stories that a fction writer can refer to and feel confdent that other writers will most likely have read, but one such story is Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” Often presented as an example of early minimalism, a literary style that Hemingway pioneered and that saw a revival in the 1980’s with Raymond Carver and other writers of the Gordon Lish school, “Hills Like White Elephants” has long been discussed in a number of contemporary textbooks and creative writing workshop as illustrative of the art of dialog and subtext. It is a testament to Hemingway’s exceptional writing abilities that the craft techniques used in “Hills Like White Elephants,” published in 1927, are still relevant to the study of fction today, but subtext is not the only lesson the story can teach a critical theory of creative writing. Examining “Hills” with a close emphasis on and deeper understanding of Hemingway’s craft techniques, viewing it within the context of the cultural forces that infuenced his work, a socio-political element in the plot emerges that has been hitherto gone undetected, one that addresses gender and racial inequalities and the disruptions these brought to the social world that Hemingway knew and observed in his writing. My purpose here is to show how this undetected element in Hemingway’s story is trenchant to the burgeoning critical theory that informs pedagogical practices in creative writing, as old inter - pretations of “Hills” point to a “white orientation, white narrative, white dominance, white defen- siveness” (Rankine 2016) that is revealed when a formalist creative writing pedagogy is examined closely; yet it also illustrates what can be gained by marrying an understanding of craft and style to critical interpretation of a text in order to construct a pedagogy of creative writing that is socio- political in nature and more inclusive than standard practices. When Paul Dawson, in “Towards a New Poetics in Creative Writing Pedagogy” argues that workshop pedagogy is “not so much a theory of writing, but a theory of reading,” because how “a work is composed by the student is not as important as how it can be read.” He proposes, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION 1 Valeri: More Than Skin-Deep Published by RIT Scholar Works, 2018