earticle

영어

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE, is a text which is very hard to categorize it as an autobiography or a Bildungsroman in that it does not feature a central narrating voice, nor does it offer chronological events showing personal development from an immature child to a mature adult. Even though Cha, in DICTEE, doesn’t depict a unified subject’s progress from youth to maturity, she interrogates many subjects such as the relationships between language and subjectivity, colonialism and nationalism, and minority discourse and the transformation of hegemony. In this paper I focus on how Cha resists the demand for uniform subjectivity, linguistically, culturally, ideologically and historically through the metaphor of dictation given to narrator using Bhabha’s notion of “hybridity and mimicry.” I also discuss how the identity of Korean nationalist martyr Guan Soon Yu, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo, St. Thrse of Lisieux, and Jeanne d'Arc is exchangeable and is connected to the identity of the author Cha. I also examine how Cha reveals the double-voiced discourse by concentrating on actual contact zones of genres.