dc.description.abstract | Abstract
Considered as a canon of post-colonial literature, Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE has been widely reviewed and discussed since 1990 in the academia. As most of the previous essays have already dealt with the theme of body in DICTEE by using Cixous’ method, l’ecriture feminine, “writing aid to be female,” to suggest Cha’s fluid writing is the subversive resistance against Western patriarchal narratives and linear writing, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, I argue that the pain in DICTEE is fluid to prove that it is the agency of the resistance. In other words, this paper delves into the physicality of Cha’s painful writing as well as to interrogate the juxtapositions of the images of the text to explore how the pain “manifests” itself by possessing a bodily form to act out.
Chapter one introduces DICTEE along with discussions on previous literary reviews to show how this text has been placed in the postcolonial and postmodern contexts. Inspired by Deleuzian ways of reading on Artaud’s body and his pain, I expect to empower the pain in DICTEE in that I believe the agony shown in Cha’s poetics of writing does not simply refer to a traumatic and lamenting expression. Therefore, Chapter two focuses on “the poetics of the struggle of pain” to see how Cha manipulates the languages to fill pain within them. I argue that the dictation and translation provided in the text is to make the readers encounter the “cracks” from which the buried and fluid pain can be sensed and from which it flows. Chapter three argues that “the painful body” presented by Cha is in a process of “becoming-tortured- skin” which breaks the limitations of boundaries of gender, nationalities, hierarchy and so on so forth, and is energized by the pain buried under the skin of the tortured body, of the text and of the suffering people. Eventually, this chapter looks for new lines of flights in a painful body served as a map.
Chapter four, the conclusion, engages my motivation to see how the entire work of Cha is an on-going movement of “becoming-” and thus it is what Deleuze calls a literary machine as well as a Body without Organs which is “smooth” enough to be a smooth space and allows all kinds of intensities to flow in order to generate in a rhizomatic attitude.
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