Proceed With Caution,

Let the reader beware. Educated readers naturally feel entitled to know what they're reading—often, if they try hard enough, to know it with the conspiratorial intimacy of a potential partner. This book reminds us that cultural differences may in fact make us targets of a text, not its co-conspirators. Some literature, especially culturally particular or "minority" literature, actually uses its differences and distances to redirect our desire for intimacy toward more cautious, respectful engagements. To name these figures of cultural discontinuity—to describe a rhetoric of particularism in the Americas—is the purpose of Proceed with Caution.

In a series of daring forays, from seventeenth-century Inca Garcilaso de la Vega to Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Sommer shows how ethnically marked texts use enticing and frustrating language games to keep readers engaged with difference: Gloria Estefan's syncopated appeal to solidarity plays on Whitman's undifferentiated ideal; unrequitable seductions echo through Rigoberta Menchú's protestations of secrecy, Toni Morrison's interrupted confession, the rebuffs in a Mexican testimonial novel. In these and other examples, Sommer trains us to notice the signs that affirm a respectful distance as a condition of political fairness and aesthetic effect—warnings that will be audible (and engaging for readings that tolerate difference) once we listen for a rhetoric of particularism.

Let the reader beware. Educated readers naturally feel entitled to know what they're reading—often, if they try hard enough, to know it with the conspiratorial intimacy of a potential partner. This book reminds us that cultural differences may in fact make us targets of a text, not its co-conspirators. Some literature, especially culturally particular or "minority" literature, actually uses its differences and distances to redirect our desire for intimacy toward more cautious, respectful engagements. To name these figures of cultural discontinuity—to describe a rhetoric of particularism in the Americas—is the purpose of Proceed with Caution.

In a series of daring forays, from seventeenth-century Inca Garcilaso de la Vega to Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Sommer shows how ethnically marked texts use enticing and frustrating language games to keep readers engaged with difference: Gloria Estefan's syncopated appeal to solidarity plays on Whitman's undifferentiated ideal; unrequitable seductions echo through Rigoberta Menchú's protestations of secrecy, Toni Morrison's interrupted confession, the rebuffs in a Mexican testimonial novel. In these and other examples, Sommer trains us to notice the signs that affirm a respectful distance as a condition of political fairness and aesthetic effect—warnings that will be audible (and engaging for readings that tolerate difference) once we listen for a rhetoric of particularism.

E. H. Friedman - Choice

[Sommer's] brilliant tour of the intersections of literature, theory, and rhetoric focuses on such topics as discontinuity, deferral, over- and underdetermination, and textual rhythms...The associations are extraordinary and effective, this is, convincingly idiosyncratic. The examples work beautifully because they suggest, but do not push, the big picture. Sommer contributes to the project of mainstreaming 'minority writing' and of breaking boundaries in general. Proceed with Caution is a major study of writing strategies, of reader response, and of the politics and distribution of authority. Highly recommended.

Doris Sommer is Professor of Romance Languages at Harvard University.