Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas by Doris Sommer

This book explores gaps and lacunae in various American texts. Sommer makes a case for reading difficulties in the text as signs of particularity that should be respected instead of as something to be deconstructed and then pushed right over. Rather than the modernist difficulties that showed the reader that his or her work was valuable, these difficulties mark moments when readers ought to realize their status as outsiders. Sommer gives a number of different types of gaps and not telling. I thought her most effective chapters were on Beloved and translation and court cases. I would have liked a conclusion that tied things together more effectively in the end, but in some senses, that might be a lacuna of its own necessary to this text.