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Reading Denzel Washington in English 141

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A few years ago, following a stunningly silent moment in a class discussion, my creative-writing students let me know that race was indeed a taboo topic on campus, at least in polite conversation. (To be fair, creative-writing classes have often and famously suffered from an overabundance of politeness.) My response was to begin teaching a course I called “Race, [Creative] Writing, and Difference,” the title borrowed from the Kwame Anthony Appiah-Henry Louis Gates Jr. volume. We read some literature of race (Noel Ignatiev, Toni Morrrison, Kenji Yoshino, Mark Twain, many others), but the vehicle for the writing in the course is the personal essay, the most raucous and open-ended and close to poetry of the well-known prose forms. Phillip Lopate’s encyclopedic Art of the Personal Essay is the point of departure here—Lopate directs us toward both intimacy and experiment, he reminds…

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