Description
"Dictee" is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictee is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself.
The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.
Review
"Reads like a secret dossier, stuffed with epistles and pictures, religion, and dreams."
, Village Voice Literary Supplement
"I love the way it remains as radical a text as it was when I first found it, daring to hold a space open somewhere in between several genres, and to let tensions remain unresolved, or ambiguous, to pursue if not the articulation of the inarticulate, then, to let the reader experience what is inarticulate within themselves still in a space that makes room for it or even values it."
-- Alexander Chee,, Electric Lit
"All writers who play with form that have come since are indebted to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, often without even knowing it. . . .thrillingly impossible to categorize, those who tried often described it as novel or autobiography–even though it employ[s] techniques of film and poetry, among others, and invoked a collection of women, ranging from the Korean freedom fighter Yu Guan Soon to Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc."
, Kenyon Review
"Dictee" is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictee is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself.
The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.
Review
"Reads like a secret dossier, stuffed with epistles and pictures, religion, and dreams."
, Village Voice Literary Supplement
"I love the way it remains as radical a text as it was when I first found it, daring to hold a space open somewhere in between several genres, and to let tensions remain unresolved, or ambiguous, to pursue if not the articulation of the inarticulate, then, to let the reader experience what is inarticulate within themselves still in a space that makes room for it or even values it."
-- Alexander Chee,, Electric Lit
"All writers who play with form that have come since are indebted to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, often without even knowing it. . . .thrillingly impossible to categorize, those who tried often described it as novel or autobiography–even though it employ[s] techniques of film and poetry, among others, and invoked a collection of women, ranging from the Korean freedom fighter Yu Guan Soon to Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc."
, Kenyon Review