Dictee

Buy this book. Trust me. Flip through it a little, it's a fun book to look at. Don't start reading it yet. Let it sit on your shelf for a while. Remember it. A month or so later open it up and flip through it again. It's got such a nice book. Take some time out to read it: choose a weekend without plans. Read it slowly, it's short enough to. After you're finished, set it down. Put it back on the bookshelf. Maybe later flip through it again. Try to think about it. It's a hard book to understand. Maybe revisit the Erato section--that was absolutely wonderful. Open to a random page and read that page. Set it down again. There's something about this book. What is it? Think about it. The object in your hands in something special, you just don't know exactly what.I finished this a few weeks ago, and while I'm still not sure quite what I read, I'm glad I did. Looking back through sections, it really does add up somehow, in a way beyond words (which is quite fitting). I understand this review is not clear, not helpful, but it's all I've got. Trust me on this, even though we haven't met, this is a book to be read.

arrived in great condition, worth it!!

I’ve get this book with satisfaction! Thanks!!

Bought this for a Comparative Literature class. Cheaper than the college bookstore, easier than the library and no worries about return dates.

I purchased this for my son's Modern and Post Modern Poetry class. The book was in good, used condition, and he enjoyed her poetry very much.It was a perfect price for his needs, and the best we could find for this book with quick shipping.

Cha takes the reader to a word with odd syntax and diction, with lovely imagery and sounds. This book is a great read. It provides historical context through narrative, and provides a great look on a minority culture(s). I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wishes to read something not following a cliched formula.

Great

As occurs in other genres of 'ecriture feminine', this text experiments rather than controls. It is a dictee, but does not dictate.Throughout Dictee, so unlike the narratives of domestic "realism" or poems of pastoral experience that continue dominate the American majority market not to mention the sterile formalism of deconstructive language writing, this other haunting the poem is primarily "the mother."But this means dictations from the mother tongue all the more so, Korean writing and speaking as if displaced and spoken from afar in San Francisco and Honolulu or, worse, yet, New York City and Paris through the art worlds.Korean, not French, not English. These others inhabiting the voice laden text of Dictee, as if dictating to and speaking through the self dispossessed narrator, are at first the Muses, but seemingly desiccated into an estranged cast of classical genres and sacred codes: Clio/History, Calliope/Epic Poetry, Urania/Astronomy, Melpomene/Tragedy, Erato/Love Poetry and so on.This Greek cast records an estrangement, a fall into language and genre as other and later. Sappho, too, is invoked as a first mother, a muse, a poet of the sublime urging emulation, worship, but threatening uncanny (un-homely) disaster on the home-front of the poet's fragile one small- voiced life.Lessons as "dictations" abound, as the force of language is instrumentalized and lost from godhead or feminine possession in childhood, as later brutally estranged from higher auspices or any pretense of truth: "The people of this country are less happy than the people of yours" (8), reads one glibly colonialist language lesson.Confessions and communions encode the innermost discourse of the self: the system of Catholicism, throughout, serves as a foreign but intimately inward sacramental language (hic meum corpus est means a lot to such saints from Joan of Arc to John [Cha] of the Cross) disturbing the self into a quest for sacred otherness: "In waiting. To receive. Him" (13).Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as Saint Therese, this becomes a sublime obsession as a play with martyrdom.The tongues having fallen into disuse, "diseuse," language cannot reclaim the sacred nor poetry its ancient vocation. Enter a call from beyond the grave, a 'dictation': "she accept pages sent care of never to be seen never to be known if name if name be known if name only seen heard spoke read cannot be never she hide all" (15). This work has had, will have, a huge uncanny afterlife since being sent in the cosmic mail in 1982 to give life and renewal to the present as present presence in us all. Pax.

Love this book, the only reason I’m not giving five stars is that, when the book arrived it was dirty and a little bit damage.

Extraordinary, quietly lyrical, intimate autobiography of sorts, composed of multilingual collages, a heterogenous mix from which emerge luminous gems and insights.

beautiful book

Very interesting read.

If you're at all interested in Asian American literature, get this book. It may seem quite crazy at first, but the great thing about Dictée is that you keep learning new things as soon as you accept Cha's way of storytelling.