Dictee - 2nd Edition by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

About the Book

"Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition features the original cover and high-quality reproductions of the interior layout as Cha intended them. Produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, this version of Dictee faithfully renders the book as an art object in its authentic form. A formative text of modern Asian American literature, Dictee is a dynamic autobiography that 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. Cha's work manifests in nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Deploying a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry, Cha links these 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."

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"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

Review Quotes

"[C]ult classic . . . [G]rapples with language in unexpected ways."-- "New York Times"

"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"

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.