“It is you standing there”: Entering Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Performance Space in Dictee

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cha's most well-known work, Dictee (1982), is a mixture of lineated and prose poetry that includes film form (e.g., the inclusion of camera angles in the textual description of a character) and is punctuated by various images, stills from movies, and documents, among other things. The act of featuring the female film spectator as actually stepping into the movie screen from the very beginning of the “Erato Love Poetry” section of Dictee posits its reader, and especially the female reader, as being able to enter the text by way of the frequent white spaces or gaps that are intentionally left between letters, words, and pages. Cha thus empowers her female reader to be actor rather than merely acted upon, seer rather than merely seen.