Abstract
An immigrant from South Korea to America, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) retraces her diasporic experiences in Dictee. The work has caught attention in the form of Korean American literary studies though often to the neglect of her diasporic albeit ambivalent narrative identities. In my thesis, I propose to define Cha as a translational artist in diaspora, then to reconsider Dictee from a multi-cultural perspective. A series of questions are raised, such as how Cha acts out her identity performance through multiple languages and wordplays, how she depicts experiences in terms of quest journey, and how her identity crisis creates the sense of estrangement in this significant text. There are two main chapters in my thesis. The second chapter analyzes the ways in which Cha queries if sign are available to articulate her private events. As a diasporic member who speaks in six languages, she does translingual dictation and intra-translation all the time. Critics usually pay attention to Cha’s stutter in uttering a foreign tongue or to her unfaithful translation, in the discussion or the challenges she poses for pedagogical dictation. But in her process of doing translation, Cha finds the languages she has acquired to be foreign to her. For Cha, she refuses to obey the dictator of a single authoritative language; thus opening up the gaps and problematics of cultural translatability. My third chapter deals with Cha’s textual strategies of re-narrating the nation and her symbolic acts of re-telling other women’s stories. To highlight this theme of re-telling, many critics have noticed how Cha’s retells Korean history and her personal stories. Extending these critics’ significant arguments, I develop two main points in my third chapter. The first one concerns Cha’s courage and insistence on passing women’s stories on. Through her writing, she juxtaposes the national history with her own experiences. To illuminate this, I further discuss how Cha negotiates the relationship between these two parts, and finds a textual space to re-narrate her stories. The thesis concludes Cha’s contented albeit unstable structure of identification and her tentative solutions to cultural conflicts and contradiction she experiences.