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University of California Press

Dictee

by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $18.95 / £15.99
Publication Date: Sep 2022
Edition: 2nd Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 178
ISBN: 9780520390492
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8
Illustrations: 25 black & white illustrations
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About the Book

Newly restored, this version of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s masterpiece honors the author's original intentions and vision for the book. Originally published in 1982, Dictee is a classic of modern Asian American literature.

Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

This restored edition, produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), reflects Cha’s original vision for the book as an art object in its authentic form, featuring:
  • The original cover
  • High-quality reproductions of the interior layout

Dictee tells 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.

This dynamic autobiography:
  • Structures the story in nine parts around the Greek Muses
  • Deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry
  • Links the women’s stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes

The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.

About the Author

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) was a poet, filmmaker, and artist who earned her BA and MA in comparative literature and her BA and MFA in art from the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Contents

CLIO                 HISTORY
CALLIOPE        EPIC POETRY
URANIA             ASTRONOMY
MELPOMENE    TRAGEDY
ERATO                LOVE POETRY
ELITERE             LYRIC POETRY
THALIA               COMEDY
TERPSICHORE  CHORAL DANCE
POLYMNIA          SACRED POETRY
 

Reviews

"Reads like a secret dossier, stuffed with epistles and pictures, religion, and dreams."
— Village Voice
"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."
— Electric Lit
"Too often, of course, the colonizing function of language goes about its invisible work without comment, but in Dictée each scene, each image, each poem or letter purposefully refers us back to it."
— Paris Review
"Dictée addresses themes of time, language, and memory that recur in much of the artist’s work while incorporating multiple forms of media, language, and historical material. . . .Nine chapters, structured around the muses of Greek mythology, result in a form that is novel, prose poem, biography, and photo book all at once." 
— Hyperallergic
"Dictée was one of the first books that taught me the transformative power that art could have on the material of a life—that conceptual art wasn’t only populated by urban white folks, and lives like Cha’s or mine or my mother’s could make a strange and wild home there, too."
— Electric Lit
"All writers who play with form that have come since are indebted to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, often without even knowing it."
— Kenyon Review
"Cha’s work . . . is both academic and emotionally present, theoretical and practical. It eschews easy classification, and is influenced by filmmakers as much as it is by playwrights, visual artists, poets, and critics." 
— Ploughshares
"The brilliance of Dictée is in its subverting the dynamics of understandability: incomprehensibility as the communicative channel, obscurity as the language to discuss illumination."
— Columbia Journal
"Dictée enlarges the notion of what a book is. . . .because it is ephemeral, fragile, fierce, and indelible, because it is subversive, because it yearns and is luminous."
— Spin
"[C]ult classic . . . [G]rapples with language in unexpected ways."
— New York Times
"Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is both the ancestor and the future of all attempts to remember and rewrite—against the force of being dismembered and rewritten by—colonial/imperial histories and their reiterative, disfiguring shadows. I have, for that reason, the feeling, maybe also the fear, that neither the experience nor the revelation of it will ever come to an end."—Brandon Shimoda, PEN America Literary Award winner and author of The Grave on the Wall

"You think you know what a book can do, then you read Dictee. A life is split by it. A text of multiple modes and languages, moving in a staccato accumulation through histories of war and displacement, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s postcolonial classic created ways and privacies where there were none. Unimaginable what literature would be today without it."—Solmaz Sharif, author of Customs

"Dictee is part memoir, part history, part experimental meditation; a challenging, innovative exploration of Cha’s life, her mother’s difficult immigrant journey across East Asia and to the United States, the fractured immigrant experience, women warriors, and language itself. . . . An essential work for feminist writers, conceptual artists and Asian American authors and scholars."—New York Times