earticle

영어

This study aims at examining the linguistic strategy employed in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. First, this paper identifies two conflicting impulses in the text: one is an impulse for home (or homing desire) and the other an impulse for non-identity and difference. The narrator of Dictee never tries to reconcile or dialectically synthesize these two impulses into a kind of third one. Rather, she leaves them coexisting, conflicting and finally driving the whole text to fall apart. However, these two impulses have one thing in common, which is the fact that they both challenge—through language—the social authority (imperialism, nationalism, patriarchy and hegemonic culture of the US) or the big Other in Lacanian sense. Therefore, language becomes a battleground in which the two conflicting impulses wage the war against the social authority. That is to say, the narrator of Dictee attempts to subvert dominant ideologies of all sorts and to tease out a possibility of finding home for Korean diasporic women from language that is imposed on her by the dominant culture.