Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 1980 experimental text, Dictee, has garnered a great deal of critical attention. In Asian American studies in particular, analyses of the text have gone hand in hand with efforts to theorize poststructuralist subjectivity and postnationalism in the critical turn against unified subjectivity and reactionary nationalisms, and towards fragmented, heterogeneous, multiple subject-formations. (1) But despite critics' theoretical orientation towards heterogeneity and the impossibility of final articulation, readers of Dictee nearly unanimously speak of a narrator and/or acting subject, and moreover, identify that narrator as Cha. For example, critics have read the narrator of the following passage, which appears early in Dictee, as Cha:

Aller a la ligne C'etait le premier jour point Elle venait de loin point ce soir au diner virgule les familles demanderaient virgule ouvre les guillemets Ca c'est bien passe le premier jour point d'interrogation ferme les guillements au moins virgule dire le moins possible virgule la reponse serait virgule ouvre les guillemets Il n'y a q'une chose point ferme les guillemets ouvre les guillemets Il y a quelqu'une point loin point ferme les guillemets Open paragraph It was the first day period She had come from a far period tonight at dinner comma the families would ask comma open quotation marks How was the first day interrogation mark close quotation marks at least to say the least of it possible comma the answer would be open quotation marks there is but one thing period There is someone period From a far period (1)

Although there are no explanations in the text, Shu-mei Shih concludes that because "Cha attended Catholic school and learned French as a child, later getting a B.A. in Comparative Literature with French emphasis," which constituted "a subtle imperialist trajectory," her "response to such inculcation is subversion through acts of ironic submissions" such as this passage (155-56). Similarly, Laura Hyun-Yi Kang writes, "The passages end with not a polite, coherent reply but with the assertion of her undeniably displaced and 'alien' status in both the French and English settings" (85, my emphasis). Likewise, Lisa Lowe describes the passage above as "a dictation assignment in French, represented as if it were the first of many exercises performed during the narrator's childhood" (132, my emphasis). As such, it "dramatizes not only the indoctrination of the Korean narrator within a 'foreign' Western language, but the 'dictee' ... also alludes to the long history of the French Catholic missionary activity in Korea that dates from the early nineteenth century" (132, my emphasis). Furthermore, Lowe refers to the narrator as "'translated' as a namesake of Saint Therese" (134). Nowhere in the novel are we told that the "narrator" is named Theresa or that there is even a singular narrator.

Such identifications are striking in their apparent invocation of a genre, autobiography, that Dictee seems to explode. A radically experimental text, Dictee incorporates narrative sections, poetry, visuals, modern Korean history, Greek mythology, French Catholicism, Carl Dreyer's films, and other elements. Some prefatory and closing material bookend nine...