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Dictee is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s only book, which was published just a few days before her death in 1982. The book mixes genres, languages, and storylines to explore women’s place in revolutions and social upheavals. It focuses on figures like Cha’s mother, Joan of Arc, goddesses from Greek mythology, and the Korean martyr Yu Guan Soon.
Dictee Quotes in Minor Feelings
The Minor Feelings quotes below are all either spoken by Dictee or refer to Dictee. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Portrait of an Artist
Quotes
Cha doesn’t ever direct your reading of Dictee. She refuses to translate the French or contextualize a letter by former South Korean leader Syngman Rhee to Franklin D. Roosevelt or caption the photo of French actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. The reader is a detective, puzzling out her own connections.
[…]
Cha spoke my language by indicating that English was not her language, that English could never be a true reflection of her consciousness, that it was as much an imposition on her consciousness as it was a form of expression. And because of that, Dictee felt true.
Related Characters:
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Explanation and Analysis:
The length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha’s own life has been baffling. […] The more I read about her, the less I knew. And the less I knew, the more I couldn’t help but regard Cha as a woman who also disappeared without explanation.
Get the entire Minor Feelings LitChart as a printable PDF.
Dictee Term Timeline in Minor Feelings
The timeline below shows where the term Dictee appears in Minor Feelings. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Portrait of an Artist
...for her upcoming show and then continued past the company that published her poetry book Dictee and the building where Hong would live more than two decades later. Cha was already...
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Hong read Dictee for the first time in Myung Mi Kim’s class at Oberlin. In the book, Cha...
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Dictee was ignored for a decade after Cha’s death, but it has since become a staple...
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...Cha’s brother John, who wrote a book about the murder (The Rite of Truth). In Dictee, Cha wrote about how her mother wouldn’t let John participate in the protests against U.S.-backed...
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...marks, which prove that “she fought back.” On the night of the murder, Flitterman-Lewis saw Dictee on display at St. Mark’s Bookshop—a store Hong once frequented, and where she once rejoiced...
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...straightforward form that Cha would never use, treating it as an “answer key” for interpreting Dictee, and emphasizing her personal connections to Cha. Hong’s father grew up in Busan as a...
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