Dictee

by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520390485
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/13/2022
Edition description:	Second Edition, Reissue, Restored Edition
Pages:	178
Sales rank:	218,746
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

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
 

Editorial Reviews

"With the original cover and high-quality interior layout as Cha had designed them, this [restored edition] is the most aesthetically appealing edition of the five that have been produced."

Asian Review of Books

"[C]ult classic . . . [G]rapples with language in unexpected ways."

New York Times

Reads like a secret dossier, stuffed with epistles and pictures, religion and dreams.

Village Voice Literary Supplement

Return of a Korean American classic.

Inside Asian America

While Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work of poetry Dictee has received due critical attention (most recently from poet Juliana Spahr), her artist's books and other art works are less well known. Dictee will be re-released this October, along with The Dream of the Audience, a book documenting a travelling exhibition dedicated to the Korean-American Cha (1951-1982). In addition to excellent reproductions of Cha's handbound texts and images from her performances, the book includes essays by Berkeley Art museum curator Constance Lewallen, Whitney Museum of American Art curator Lawrence Rinder and critic and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"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 - Alexander Chee

"Dictée enlarges the notion of what a book is. . . . Because it is ephemeral, fragile, fierce, and indelible, because it is subversive, because it years and is luminous."

Spin

"All writers who play with form that have come since are indebted to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, often without even knowing it."

Kenyon Review

A resolutely avant-garde book. . . . Dictée has spent decades as a cult classic, becoming a fixture of Asian American and feminist studies syllabi across the country.

The Nation

"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

"A fringe classic for students of women’s studies, book arts, and poetry."

Artforum

"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

"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

"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

"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 - Elaine Castillo