Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas by Doris Sommer (20-Jul-1999) Paperback

by Doris Sommer

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 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.

Paperback

First published August 1, 1999

About the author

Doris Sommer is the Ira and Jewell Williams Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she is Founder and Director of Cultural Agents: Arts and Humanities in Civic Engagement. She is the author of The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education and editor of Cultural Agency in the Americas.

Reviews

[Monserrat Maxfield Markov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ya lo decía y lo vuelvo a decir: No es una lectura que recomiende, yo diría que se podria utilizar para leer por capítulos y hacer reflexiones con ellos, pero una lectura que sea de placer, no lo creo.
Hay opiniones con las que voy y otras no, me parece que Doris te cuenta en plan negativo de un autor, pero nunca toma como un posicionamiento al respecto, lo cual no me agrado, pero sí, el libro es muy buena por su escritura, y nada más.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only read "Advertencia/Warning" and "A Rhetoric of Particularism" for class, but I will definitely be coming back to this.