Poetry as a political tool: text and image in the narrative of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

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Content Poetry as a Political Tool:
Text and Image in the Narrative of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
By
Kat Sayarath
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
May 2018
Copyright 2018 Kat Sayarath
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my primary reader, Andrew Campbell, whose
wisdom was instrumental to my engagement with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work. His
excitement and ongoing support made a positive impact on me and my time at USC. I am
thankful for my thesis committee members, Rochelle Steiner and Annette Kim, for their
insightful feedback, challenging questions, and generosity.
I am grateful for the support of Karen Moss and Noura Wedell, whose guidance was pivotal to
the conception of this thesis.
Additional thanks to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Archive for welcoming my research on Theresa Cha, specifically Stephanie Cannizzo, Lisa
Calden, and Tracy Jones.
Lastly, I am grateful for the support of my family, Thong Sayarath and Christina Sayarath.
iii

DEDICATION

To my father, Kaysone Sayarath.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract v
Introduction: Origin 1
Chapter 1: Pomegranate Offering, 1975 9
Chapter 2: Permutations, 1976 16
Chapter 3: Dictée, 1982 24
Bibliography 33
v
Abstract

This thesis poses questions concerning implicit hierarchies within language, looking at
how it functions as a social and cultural barrier that subverts communication. By reducing text to
symbols and units, rearranging text and using blank spaces on the page as signifiers, Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha allows the viewer-reader to experience visual, written, and oral interactions
beyond the boundaries of grammatical structure. Her radical approach to liberation (thus,
redemption), through the use of poetry as a narrative entry allows diasporic subjects the political
agency to work within and without the systems around them.

1
Introduction: Origin
My work until now, in one sense has been a series of metaphors for this return, going back to a
lost time and space, always in the imaginary. The content of my work has been the realization of
the imprint, the inscription etched from the experience of leaving, the experience of America. It
has served as both shadow and reflection in my work and myself as an individual.
1

-Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
This thesis is focused on language as a communicative form of oppression and liberation
that exists as both a barrier to and opening for colonial resistance.
2
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s
1982 novel Dictée provides an opportunity to examine the inherent inadequacies, pitfalls, and
potentialities of language.
3
By breaking away from the traditional uses of language and adding
visual media, Cha objectifies and materializes both English and French, and constructs a
dichotomy between text and image. In short, she uses these two forms as vehicles to speak on
themes of displacement within the immigrant narrative. Close attention to the immigrant
narrative is crucial to my reading of Cha’s practice, as the institution of language implicit in her
work allows for an acknowledgement of the language systems at play as well as room for play.
The inscription Cha writes about in the epigraph above explains that language is a medium
between thought and speech, which records and responds to memory.
My affinity to Cha was neither coincidental nor natural. I was first introduced to Dictée
while finishing my undergraduate degree in literature and originally felt contempt towards her
writing style.
4
It reminded me of my childhood, specifically in the way my mother spoke English
1
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Artist’s Statement / Summary of Work, Cha Collection, University of California, Berkeley Art
Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 1992.4.412, https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/tf4j49n6h6/.
2
Roland Barthes and Richard Howard, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 33.
3
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
4
Throughout this thesis, I break into the voice of the first person “I” in the same way that Theresa Cha alternates between the
first, second, and third person. In doing this, I intend to explore all avenues of expression that are not confined to formal or
functional uses of institutionalized language. My political (and poetic) decision to assert my personal narrative in this paper is to
honor and celebrate the work that Cha has done for students such like myself, existing between several identities.
2
to me and how I purposely spoke English to her. To someone who does not speak their adopted
county’s tongue, cutting sentences and accentuating certain keywords are natural and desperate
attempts to communicate. It brought up feelings of shame, reminding me that English was not
my first language, and had unwillingly become my primary language. The more time I spent
away from my family—in grade school and later in academia—shifted the ways in which I
consider my identity; there was a noticeable difference between being born in America and being
American, and I identified with both. This experience of being first-generation was alienating, as
assimilation was not so much the issue, but rather, viewing your parent’s assimilation as distant
and separate from your experience of America stirs up feelings of what I call inherited guilt.
Guilt is a complex emotion to have at such a young age, as there are no external or
internal resources to justify such feelings. Growing up in a household of immigrant parents and
then being asked to quickly speak English to one’s friends, teachers, strangers, etc., inevitably
causes tension between the two identities: the diasporic lineage that is vaguely present and the
new American. I argue that the tension (the difference) between the two identities is not extreme,
but rather exist as nuanced shifts in how one responds to the systems working around them. To
put it simply: how one views the world and how one begins to take part in that world. It is
because of these tensions that exists in my own identity that I kept coming back to Cha in my
adulthood.
I do not believe that Cha’s legacy is meant to be understood in its entirety as that would
go against the values of her practice. Admittedly, there are many moments in her work that
involve tedious engagements and in those instances, I have learned on the third or fourth read
that I must let go. I learned that letting go is also a political choice and not a negative one at that.
There have been many academic texts that I found challenging, uncomfortable, and perplexing.
3
These texts are considered superior, niche, and hyper-intellectual. These texts involve a great
deal of theory that a reader may hope to read in order to be enlightened, to be taken into the gulf
of liberty or freedom by way of a transformative literary account. Like Dictée, the profound
meaning in the text (that I had to find because it was not readily available), was never palpable to
me and I myself had resented my relationship to the English language. Dictée has also taught me
that letting go and allowing oneself to look over words and phrases that may seem like
intellectual-political-academic-social-cultural gatekeepers is powerful in itself. The act of letting
go, giving up and saying no to the finite quality of language is to make room for a different kind
of relationship to such communicative structures—a relationship involving the pictorial, where
the reader and the speaker make a space for the visual imaginary. The act of letting go of the
language system is to become both a reader and a viewer simultaneously.
Dictée exists as a dichotomy: it is at once innovative and tedious. Postcolonial and
feminist concepts exist, and yet the act of reading the novel makes us wary of Cha’s intentions.
This skepticism is rooted in the book’s multilingual quality, written in colonial languages–one
(particularly Cha) cannot expect the reader to be fluent in all six chosen languages in the text.
5

Perhaps it is this thrust and the limitations to learning, remembering, memorizing ways to
communicate, gesture, and exchange that launched her research into the world of semiotics.
Memory is formless. Though we are unable to physically contain it, it is nevertheless
captive and malleable. The veracity of memory is always questioned. To the displaced person, a
person who adopts a foreign culture from their own for an opportunity, a chance at a better life,
memory exists as a source of truth, a historical account that contributes to one’s self-identity. In
contrast, in the world of literature, we can approach any recollection of memory as fiction, a

5
The six languages that are used in Dictée are English, French, Chinese, Korean, Latin, and Ancient Greek.
4
representation of a conscious (or unconscious) constructed past. Fiction, the invented world
where the social fabric of our society can be inverted, allows the artist and writer to imagine a
place without the consequences of reality. My thesis is concerned with the possibilities of a
fictive world through the use of poetry. In Cha’s attempt to deconstruct and decenter the lexicon,
does the world of language expand or contract? Cha disrupts and fragments traditional systems
of language, and her radical undertaking of the signifying system of language creates a space for
inclusion: a collective experience of conditions where the tongue is forced to succumb to foreign
sounds, movements, and gestures. In contrast, the opposite could be said, that her reformation of
the fundamental rules of language makes her work accessible only to those who have mastery
over language and can thus abstract it. She argues, however, that there must be a position in
between. Perhaps this is why Cha invests in the imaginary, a place of both mastery and
unknowing.
6

Theresa Cha’s deconstructive practice of subverting language is founded on her close
study of French theorists, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. Taking
cues from structuralist theory and French symbolism, Cha navigates the confines of the blank
page, with the inclusion and exclusion of its margins, edges, and borders, exhibiting its
advantages and disadvantages. Her work is also influenced by French Symbolist poet Stéphane
Mallarmé, best known for his typographical poem, Un Coup de Dés (A Throw of the Dice will
Never Abolish Chance).
7
Written in the late 19th century, the poem plays with several typefaces
in various sizes, intensifying certain words, playing not only with space, but with the hierarchy
of signifiers. The placement of text and space on the page and space between words, letters,
images, prequels a time before graphic design. Similarly, Cha compulsively explores the spatial

6
Cha, Artist’s Statement.
7
Jaroslav Anděl, The Avant-Garde Book 1900–1945 (New York: Franklin Furnace, 1989), 6–7.
5
and temporal occurrences and instances on the page. The temporality for Cha is the unknown
territory in which thoughts exist, the instance where memory is stored before it is realized
through oral or written language. By using text and image as modes of conveyance, her work
picks up on the spatial and temporal indicators of memory, most often as a collage of cultural
experiences. She states, “Alternation and repetition of images and sound, simultaneous narration,
and live action are combined and isolated. These methods intend to shift chronology of events, to
displace them spatially and temporally, for further possible relationships and extra-
dimensionality of the narrative.”
8

My research is concerned with this “extra-dimensionality” in Cha’s work, which I will
explore through her use of poetry as an oppositional deployment of language to colonial
subjugation. Using poetry as a political bearing, Cha positions herself as diasporic subject, being
able to speak from within and without the structures of citizenship, an artist-poet committed
against the natural action to assimilate.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in 1951 in Busan, South Korea. After her family’s
exile from their native land due to the Korean War, Cha and her family relocated to Hawaii for
one year and then moved to San Francisco, California in 1964.
9
Cha attended the University of
California, Berkeley from 1969-1978 where she received four degrees: a BA in Comparative
Literature, a BA in Art, an MA in Art, and an MFA in Art.
10
Her coupled academic interests in
literature and the visual arts is representative of her practice with language. Cha was
multilingual, fluent in English, French, and Korean. While a student at Berkeley, a robust anti-
war protest movement emerged from university campuses to national platforms. Reacting to the

8
Cha, Artist’s Statement.
9
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works, ed. Constance M. Lewallen (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009), 2.
10
Cha, Exilée and Temps Morts, 2.
6
political climate of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, artists challenged and invented new ways to
conceive and exhibit their work in response to the liberation movements. Cha, like her peers,
experimented and produced work in various media, including performance, installation, and
video.
11
Although mostly known for her two-dimensional work, Cha also occasionally produced
objects and experimented with materials such as burlap, cloth, and stencils. Her objects
manifested as artist books, postcards, and envelopes. Much of her work, however, was not
focused on the final object, but rather, a documentation of that object. As expressed in her
archive, Cha was interested in the recording of work and its implications.
It is appropriate to read Cha through a structuralist lens because it is her historical milieu,
and thinkers like Barthes inform the vast majority of her output. Though I apply structuralist
theory to understand the inspiration in her practice, this thesis prioritizes a subject-orientated
approach, an approach that acknowledges the fundamental practices of poetry, the appropriation
of text and sentence structure as a way to accentuate meaning, as conceptual origin and
wayfaring point. Using literary critic Terry Eagleton’s theory on (postmodern) poetics as an
entry, I see internal and external influences in her work, qualities that are inherent in language
but not restricted by its own system.
12
In offering literary theory and the study of semiotics as
one angle of reading and unfolding her authorship, this thesis seeks out the various and multiple
ways in which the immigrant narrative can manifest itself within and beyond the boundaries of
grammatical syntax.
Since her untimely death in 1982, many have contributed to the literature on Cha, namely
in the latter half of the 1990s. The first retrospective exhibition of Cha’s work, The Dream of the
Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha curated by Constance Lewallen was presented in 2001 at the

11
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
12
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2015), 88.
7
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) and
traveled to venues in five countries.
13
In January 2018, Cha’s work was presented again in a solo
exhibition at BAM/PFA, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictée, curated by Stephanie
Cannizzo. Unlike the museum’s earlier retrospective, Avant Dictée focuses on Dictée’s ten
chapters as Cha’s central work, orienting artworks from her archive that are in dialogue with the
themes of the nine Greek muses.
14
In is evident in her body of work that Cha repeatedly asked
the same group of questions regarding language, immigration, and history (of the past and of
memories) throughout her career. Avant Dictée argues that the novel has been influential in many
disciplines— Dictée remains a touchstone for postcolonial Studies—thereby positioning Cha as
an intersectional artist.
Scholar Gordon Kim Hadfield explores Cha’s relationship to altered photography and
visual media in Dictée, or rather Cha’s use and misuse of technology as an implication of time
and space, thus acknowledging futuristic devices as deficient objects.
15
One can see this kind of
(mis)use as an act of resistance to technological determinism.
16
American poet Juliana Spahr
constitutes Dictée as a redemptive postmodern text; by presenting works in six different
languages, all of which have implicit power relationships governing them, the reader is asked to
throw away all passivity and instead, to interact with the text from global perspectives and with
political agency (involuntarily).
17
I agree with Spahr and extend her insight to the rest of Cha’s

13
Constance Lewallen, Lawrence Rinder, and Trinh Minh-Ha, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–
1982) (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, 2001). This footnote refers to the catalogue of the exhibition,
including essays written by Constance Lewallen, Lawrence Rinder, and Trinh Minh-Ha, with reproduced images of artwork and
poetry from the exhibition from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s archive housed at BAM/PFA. This catalogue provided me the
biography and important literature on Cha.
14
Press Release for the exhibition Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee, on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art
Museum and Pacific Film Archives from Jan. 31 to Apr. 22, 2018, https://bampfa.org/press/bampfa-mounts-major-solo-
exhibition-work-theresa-hak-kyung-cha.
15
Gordon Hadfield , "Sounding Time: Temporality, Typography, and Technology in Twentieth -Century American Poetry,"
PhD. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10477/45224
16
Ibid.
17
Juliana M. Spahr, "Postmodernism, Readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Dictee," College Literature 23, no. 3 (1996): 23–
43.
8
oeuvre insofar that the act of resistance is key not only to Dictée, but also across all of her work.
Perhaps this is why there have only been two exhibitions dedicated to Cha: her work is difficult
to experience. Objects are meant to be read and accessibility is hindered by one’s linguistic
capacity.
In thinking through Cha’s use of poetry and its positionality, I will analyze three of her
works. First, Pomegranate Offering, an artist book Cha conceived in 1975. This piece
acknowledges Cha not only as a writer and as an artist that works with language, but also as an
artist with a background in traditional craftsmanship in bookmaking. Inside the book one finds
stenciled letters, which can be read as poems, depending on how one interprets them. Here, we
see the true materialization of language, at the hands of the poet-artist. The second example is
Cha’s 1976 film Permutations features Cha’s younger sister, Bernadette Cha. Filmed in 35mm,
Permutations exemplifies the artist’s use of visual media, relying on the image as a reminder of
the past. The last example is Cha’s acclaimed 1982 novel Dictée, which was ahead of its time,
both conceptually and formally. In it, Cha combines text in six languages, found images, poetry,
letters, depicting the (auto)biographies of martyred female subject interpreted via postcolonial
theory, women studies, ethnic studies, and comparative literature. In Dictée we see a synthesis of
the concerns governing her life’s work.

9
Chapter 1: Pomegranate Offering, 1975

One of Cha’s lesser known works mentioned in the previous chapter exists in the form of
an artist book titled Pomegranate Offering. Based on my understanding of her practice, I
imagined that most of her work would be heavily textual and photographic, assuming that upon
my visit to her archive at BAM/PFA, I would be reviewing all if not mostly two-dimensional
work. However, my understanding and notion of the artist shifted drastically when I discovered
Pomegranate Offering, as this piece required not only a visual interpretation, but also a haptic,
tactile experience. Pomegranate Offering is one of many examples of Cha’s versatility as an
artist, showing her abilities as poet, painter, and object maker.
Cha’s use of the book format shows her wish to embark on a shift in thinking about the
ways in which signs are comprehended and communicated. Though the term artist book is
originally a French term,
18
Cha was introduced to book-binding when she was child in South
Korea, where hand bound books were part of the culture.
19
In The Avant-Garde Book 1900-
1945, Jaroslav Andêl replaces the term artist book with avant-garde book, as the latter term
broadens the topic, opening it to reference all cultural roots and art movements, while the former
term is exclusive to the French. He states that the mobility of the avant-garde book allows it to
outperform other fine art mediums such as painting and sculpture, “The avant-garde book often
functioned as a project of totality and a testing ground for artists’ visions. It was the means by
which the avant-garde explored the relationship between signs, both verbal and visual, and
reality.”
20
Pomegranate Offering offers a communal and yet individual experience; the object is

18
Anděl, The Avant-Garde Book, 6.
19
Lewallen et al., The Dream of the Audience, 3.
20
Anděl, The Avant-Garde Book, 6
10
meant to be opened, read, and passed on. It is a mobile object that acts also as a depot for
language and for histories.
Pomegranate Offering was first exhibited in 1977 at Other Books and So in Amsterdam,
Holland. The book is 14.5 inches by 15 inches and the material is thick beige canvas. It is heavy
and visually provocative. The only “images” in it are the texts which are made visible via size,
color, and spatial arrangement on the page. The text in the book was most likely written by the
artist, though it is not confirmed.
21
The narrative is nonlinear, each page existing as both an
entrance and exit into fragment and stanza. The words are hand painted stencils, charcoal and
ink, in both black and red. Cha makes a visual hierarchy of words on a page where the text reads:

veil
A VEIL
a veil
RE VELL
REVEAL
REVEIL
REVE
ARRive
rive
riviére
REVERE
22

She aesthetically experiments with words in the colonial languages of French and English,
starting from the word veil and ending with REVERE. Using this technique, she alternates
between upper and lowercase letters, changing the spelling of words by adding spaces where
they are unnecessary and inconsistently omitting accent marks, Cha treats language like an
image, changing its traditional linguistic markers and cues so that we see the letter as a sign and

21
Information regarding Theresa Cha’s Pomegranate Offering is available at the Online Archive of California,
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf6w1004tk/?brand=oac4.
22
Ibid.
11
not as a foreign letter. The meaning of each word is powerful when in context with each other:
these words sound and look similar but yield different meanings. She then adheres multiple
meanings to these signs by appropriating words to offer a narrative that is not limited by
institutionalized grammar. This disassociation from syntactic conventions is where Cha
negotiates and transacts between space, time, and meaning, and is deeply rooted in the tradition
of the artist book. This conforms to the history that Andêl traces, as he states, “The avant-garde
book initiated an interplay between visual and verbal signs by subverting and often eliminating
their hierarchy. Instead of subordinating pictures to words in a predetermined order, as in the
traditionally illustrated book, the avant-garde used these two systems of signification to interact
in a variable relation which opened new possibilities.” Interaction here is not so much a vocal or
performative one, but rather a subtle awareness that the ways in which information is distributed
might be unpredictable and nonteleogoical.
23
Here, Cha subordinates one text to another text, one
language to another, through the interaction and distinction between English and French.
The weight of the individual pages and book overall is heavy, comprised of burlap-
colored canvas of thick weave. The image of the text here offers bodily presence in terms of its
referred meanings, processes of veiling and revealing, a play of signification found in both
language and the adornment of the body. The layering of the thick weave on the book literalizes
the text, becoming a veil itself. Cha shows us through the objectification of language how it
would look to someone who is not native to either tongue. In a sense, Cha democratizes language
by using language’s social and cultural barriers as aesthetic markers, and through the
unconventional turn and variation of spellings, we, the viewer-reader, experience the text beyond
its most common inference.

23
Anděl, The Avant-Garde Book, 6.
12
Considered from the perspective of Barthes’ “Death of the Author,”
24
the avant-garde
book can be viewed as a form in which the artist can separate herself from a work where her
authorship is not prioritized. The viewer is forced to create meaning between disparate terms of
languages. It is interesting that Cha chose the avant-garde book as a medium for transmuting and
subverting language. The book in general is a cultural object that holds information, knowledge,
and normatively serves as an educational tool. In this way, Cha intentionally subverts all those
components of a book and undermines its authority, using it as a playground where space, color,
and materiality become part of the experience. In doing this, the force of words that appear
before us increase visually and the meaning of the word gradually vanishes. Though we are not
totally disengaged from the words, it is difficult to engage with the words if the viewer does not
speak both English and French. The hierarchy of text created by Cha is rather lyrical in its close
alliteration to each other and the definitions of the words allude to one another. When translated
into English, the words read:

Veil
A veil
Reveler
Reveal
Revival
Dream
Arrive
River bank
River
Revere

Within this compilation of words, there is a recollection of a memory. As we work our
way down the hierarchy, the one word that does not sound like the rest is the word Dream. The

24
Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, Image-Music-Text ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 142.

13
book ends with, “POMEGRANATE offering / Mouth with red tears / with red / blood pearls.”
The title refers to the story of the ancient Greek goddess Persephone, who was abducted by
Hades, the god of the underworld. The myth states that Hades deceptively offered Persephone
pomegranate seeds in order to keep her captive. Of course, Persephone took his offering and was
forced to live half of the year with him underground. Because of this, she may only live half of
the year with her mother. Persephone as a theme appears again in Cha’s Dictée, where Demeter,
the goddess’ mother, mourns her daughter’s absence. This story is symbolic of separation, which
for Cha references her separation from her own culture, and the separation of culture experienced
between generations. Reception is key to her play with text and image, thus allowing her access,
or rather the viewer-reader access, to references and allusions to multiple histories, literatures,
and realities. As apparent in this work, Cha is not concerned with the re-telling of the Greek
myth but the replaceability of the words and context in the myth. Yes, Cha summons the
protagonist Persephone in Pomegranate Offering, but she also changes the narrative with this
insertion. The importance of Cha’s revision to the story of Persephone is an indication of
arbitrariness, Eagleton states “Between sign and referent, word and thing, helped to detach the
text from its surroundings and make of it an autonomous object.”
25

On another page, the words read “by GRACE devotion / by GRACE distortion / by
RECALLING devotion / by RECALLING distortion / by devotion / by distortion.” The word
Distortion appears three times and is aggressively crossed out with red markings each time.
Here, visually, we see an example of doubt and anger which distorts legibility. Cha uses like-
sounding words as a poetic decision, and these homophones are rooted in deep ambivalence and
irony. To the audience viewing and reading this book, the red markings would be enough to

25
Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 86.
14
incite curiosity in the viewer-reader–what is being censored, what is being hidden? Thus, the red
marker is a sign for the viewer-reader to stop and reevaluate how one reads the text. It disorients
and interrupts comprehension, posing the question: how should I view or read what is in front of
me and what significance should I attach to it? I would argue that Pomegranate Offering
provides a nuanced distinction between the reader and the viewer, wherein the former is meant to
comprehend a message, while the latter is meant to inspect the composition of a book as a work
of art.
The power of alliteration, “the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of
adjacent or closely connected words,”
26
and “assonance, the repetition of the sound of a vowel in
non-rhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the echo to be discernible,”
27

distinguishes and distances the viewer from the reader. Eagleton looks to the prominent
semiotician Yuri Lotman’s take on alliteration in poetry, noting “If two words are associated
together because of their similar sound or position in the metrical scheme, this will produce a
sharper awareness of their similarity or difference of meaning. The literary work continually
enriches and transforms mere dictionary meaning, generating new significances by the clash and
condensation of its various ‘levels.’”
28
The dramatic disruption in lines and stanzas causes a stir
in the viewer-reader’s participation, turning the predictability of a word into a rejuvenated
experience. Here, the viewer is asked to take part not only as a visual witness but as an
interpreter. The reader, on the other hand, is taken away from the literary trenches and is asked to
formally evaluate the text as a symbol unreliable to its story and narrative arc.

26
Google; Google dictionary entry for “alliteration.”
27
Google; Google dictionary entry for “assonance.”
28
Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 88-89.
15
From a structuralist perspective, Pomegranate Offering exists separate from outside
realities and refers to itself; the words and narrative content are interrelated and any analysis can
be made in conjunction and in comparison to one another, whether one speaks or reads English
or French. This method of analysis is contrived, as it is apparent that Cha intentionally uses
literary theory and poetics to allude to external content. This is present in the symbolic reference
to the pomegranate and its roots in ancient Greek myth. The contents of Pomegranate Offering
visually and formally positions texts in an unusual order to create new meanings. Further, in
creating new sign relationships in different verbal rhymes and word repetitions realized in
charcoal and black and red paint, Cha shows us the flexibility of grammatical language, but the
re-creation and re-production of language outside grammar and linear sentences can allow for a
modernization and democratization of the viewer-reader reception. Elaborating on reception
within poetic narratives, Eagleton explains that “Meaning of the text is not just an internal
matter: it also inheres in the text’s relation to wider systems of meaning, to other texts, codes and
norms in literature and society as a whole.”
29
I agree with Eagleton that each individual obeys
different sets of codes in the production and arrangement of one’s speech and text (the creation
of sentences), allowing an entry for others readers of differences and similarities. The dichotomy
can be studied through Cha’s experience of America. She takes the position of a newcomer in
her adopted country, becoming a multilingual academic. Cha has, in a sense, assimilated to
American culture and life. Her status in society is always in conflict with the immigrant identity.
Here, Cha deals with the dual systems in which she operates. In this regard, it can be argued that
Cha uses the formal qualities of poetics to reconcile the two extremes.

29
Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 89.
16

Chapter 2: Permutations, 1976

Permutations, a 1976 structuralist film represents another instance where Cha distances
and deeply confines the viewer. The dictionary defines Permutations as, “a way, especially one
of several possible variations, in which a set or number of things can be ordered or arranged.”
30

The 16mm black and white film is silent. Permutations presents an image of a young woman as
its primary subject. The youthful woman on the screen is Bernadette Cha, the artist’s sister, yet
this fact is not apparent.
31
The woman stares into the camera, forging a direct engagement with
the viewer. The subject holds a perpetual gaze with the viewer but small gestures such as closing
her eyes and turning her head break this connection. Cha uses short repetitive sequences as a
narrative technique. This monotonous technique creates tension between redundancy and anxiety
to the viewer. Unlike traditional mainstream cinema, the film lacks long seamless shots. Instead,
it is composed of short clips coupled with montage-style editing. Black frame. White frame.
Subject faces the camera. Her lips relax. Her lips shut. Subject turns away from the camera, yet
Chat edits out the action of Bernadette turning, instead introducing the next sequence, an unclear
shot that resembles both her side profile covered with her long black hair and the back of her
head. Eyes closed. Left profile. Right profile. Her long black hair. Repeat. The editing retains
staccato rhythm. The film breaks its pattern of profiling when Theresa Cha appears in a brief
single shot at the end of the film. Within a blink of an eye, this shot can be missed or easily
dismissed as Bernadette, although the two siblings look nothing alike. In this film, Cha omits
language altogether. Her directorial choices to use black and white film, and to obliterate sound
and speech ask her viewer to reconsider our knowledge of film. Again, we see how Cha uses the

30
Google; Google dictionary entry for “permutation.”
31
I argue that the confusion between the two and the fact that Cha does not make an effort to clarify this in the film is purposeful.
17
formal qualities in film in the way she uses poetry—a form of language that can be played with
into perpetuity.
Her directorial style is rooted in the history of underground film, as Permutations
operates without a structure. Highly influenced by French film theory, Cha took inspiration from
innovative filmmakers such as French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard who is heavily
influenced by Alexandre Astruc’s writings on film as a new language that could contain more
meaning than the written language. In his essay, The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La Camera-
Stylo,
32
Astruc states:
...for in this kind of film-making the distinction between the author and the director
loses all meaning. Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene,
but a true act of writing. The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer
writes with his pen. –We on the contrary are seeking to broaden it and make it the
most extensive and clearest language there is.
33

Astruc advocates that “Film Language is the exact equivalent of literary language. By language, I
mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they
may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel.” He
coins this new invention of cinema with the phrase “the age of the camera-stylo (camera-pen).”
The idea is that over time, the power of the camera will begin to transcend itself, separating from
the visual and the format of the image into a new written language.
34

Permutations extends from the written to the filmic. By using film as a “camera-stylo,”
Cha proposes that the written language (institutionalized language) is arbitrary and obsolete in

32
Alexander Astruc, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo," New Wave Film.com,
http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/camera-stylo-astruc.shtml. Originally published as "Du Stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au
stylo," in L'Écran française (30 March 1948).
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
18
getting information across, and is thus, flexible and negotiable, opening doors for new media.
The film is Cha’s attempt to create a visual language, which can be addressed in the four
communicative (visual) methods she uses: the reciprocal gaze between the viewer and the
subject, the identity of the subject (who are we looking at?), the omission of speech, and the
radical opposition between film and photography.
French New Wave pioneer Jean Luc Godard offers films that are often expressly or
implicitly political. He approaches language, space, and the subject point on, mainly operating
within a plot driven narrative, with characters who were inclined to battle a specific type of
existential crisis. Godard is fixated on the male gaze in that he focuses the camera mainly on the
female subject whose narrative is always peripheral to the male protagonist. Cha, on the other
hand, is interested in the subtlety of the singular character and the restriction and boundaries of
speech. Conceptually, she uses film as a way to convey meaning via the gap between speech and
image, and her use of the camera was rather stationary and lacked movement, in opposition to
Godard, who wanders with the camera to many different locations. She is not so interested in the
illusionistic properties of film to create an alternate reality, but rather the function of the medium
as a recording force that could communicate through visuals.
Cha relies heavily on a gaze that is variously held and broken between the viewer and the
subject. The moments of the gaze become signifiers of their own, in place of sound and speech.
In having the subject gaze at the viewer intermittently, Cha apprehends a moment, an instance,
which language cannot. The gaze is the “realization of the imprint.”
35
In this alternate universe,
the gaze substitutes oral and written communication, making language obsolete. The rhythm of

35
Cha, Artist’s Statement.
19
the gaze and its permeability matches word sequenced poems—and in this way Cha uses a
camera-stylo to accomplish a similar goal in film to the one she pursues in poetry.
As previously noted, the primary subject is not Theresa Cha, but her sister, Bernadette
Cha. This is not the first instance of “doubling” that Cha uses in her practice. I see this doubling
as a transfer of subjectivity and also, an injection of herself onto another. This doubling is a way
to symbolically understand the collective immigrant narrative within a singular subject narrative.
While this doubling is apparent in her artwork Repetitive Pattern (1975) and Pause Still (1979),
it is the first instance of doubling we see in her directorial work. In doing this, we are reminded
that the film (like any other film) operates in an alternate sphere, one of mediated representation.
The contents of the film do not indicate a specific time or location other than the passing of time
and this is only indicated by the color and density of the images. As the film progresses, the
images change color (light to dark) the film becomes less sharp (blurry). By depicting the image
or the narrative in black and white, she constructs a veil. This veil operates as a barrier between
us and the film, also known as the real and the imaginary.
36
In cinema, the imaginary, which
theorist Gilles Deleuze defines as “–games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification
and projection, always in the mode of the double” is conditioned and habituated by a fabricated
account that was strategically pre-thought out. The viewer, operating from the sphere of reality,
is taken into the imaginary of Cha and her subject.
37
The symbolic appears in liminal space
between the viewer and the screen. Deleuze states, “Symbolic elements are incarnated in the real
beings and objects of the domain considered; the differential relations are actualized in real
relations between these beings; the singularities are so many places in the structure, which

36
Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands: and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004), 170
37
Ibid., 172.
20
distributes the imaginary attitudes or roles of the beings or objects that come to occupy them.”
38

A question here, for me, arises from the title of the film: is the subject, Bernadette, a permutation
of Cha, and if so, does Cha see her immigrant identity through a collective familial lens, which is
to say, a collective immigrant lens? How do we synthesize this piece through the transfer of the
author-artist onto the subject? Cha’s subjectivity is not totally absent from her own piece as she
authored the film, but what is to be said of Cha positioning partial subjectivity to her sister? This
trope is not unusual to Cha’s practice, projecting her subjectivity onto another figure. In Dictée,
narratives of the other female characters sit alongside her own, implying a kind of surrogate
identity. Not completely absent from Dictée, Cha inserts herself into her memoir as a vulnerable
yet ominous first person, the “I.” In this film, there is no “I” to inscribe as there is no verbal cue
to take. The mirroring of Cha and Bernadette can be likened to her approach to using English and
French interchangeably. By doing so, Cha demonstrates colonial languages as iterations of each
other; the verbal and written language is unclear, undescriptive, and Permutations brings in the
image as language so as to distinguish the two. Coming back to the reciprocal gaze, the viewer
and the subject mirror each other. There must be a sublime message to the transfer of
subjectivity; if anyone who is able to remember then memory must be unreliable.
In regard to identity and the platform of film, Bernadette Cha becomes a symbol for
racial difference. Permutations was filmed in 1976 and first screened six years later in 1982 at
Cinematheque, San Francisco Art Institute.
39
Film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, which describes the position of female subject in the
advancement of technology, specifically in cinema. She states, “It is no longer the monolithic

38
Ibid., 177.
39
Theresa Cha, Permutations, 1976, Cha Collection, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,
1992.4.206, https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/tf509nb05x/.
21
system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s. Technological advances (16mm, etc.) have changed the economic conditions
of cinematic production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus, it has been
possible for an alternative cinema to develop.”
40
In the year following the publication of this
canonical text, art theorist Rosalind Krauss wrote “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” as she
was concerned with the exploitive use of video as a means to look at the self, specifically as a
response to the male ego. It is important to see Cha in the context of Mulvey and Krauss as well
as other important contemporaries of her time, especially as Cha came of age in the late
seventies. Mulvey states, “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male
other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through
linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as
bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”
41
Permutations and the 1975 film Mouth to Mouth
offer a new angle of analysis and a portal for female artists to enter. Cha disregards inclusion of
male subjects in her film and involves herself in all aspects of the film, from its concept to its
production to its final presentation, implicating herself as not only the bearer of meaning, but as a
maker of meaning. This marks an exciting time, as it was not only Cha’s coming of age but the
foundation on which female identities were beginning to come into the foreground.
Repetition is an obscuring device that informs Cha’s practice. We can look at repetition
here in two ways: the material reproduction of the image and the repetition of the filmed image
of Bernadette. In Camera Lucida, French literary theorist Roland Barthes states that the
photograph does a special thing that no other art form is able to do, neither the painted portrait,
nor the mirror. He writes, “What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once:

40
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2003): 44-53.
41
Ibid.
22
the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
42
Whenever a
human subject’s image is captured, this image becomes the product of capitalism. The
photograph is able to capture a moment of time (time as linear and as one particular event that
cannot occur again) and is able to replicate it to infinity. He goes on to distinguish this
characteristic of the photograph as the “sovereign contingency,” the Lacanian tuche, the
Occasion, the Encounter, the Real. Cha moves away from this capitalist hold on the body as
object by using film as a diversion. The clips of Cha can indeed be replicated for public use (as it
has been) but these clips are always positioned as part of cinema—of a creation. In the repetition
of Bernadette, it becomes apparent that the repeating subject is a woman and even more so, of
Asian descent. After all, even in the 1970s, it was rare for experimental underground filmic
practices to center a film on an Asian subject. After being confronted with Bernadette’s racial
“signifiers,” we begin to look at her as not a subject of the film but as a person different (or the
same) from us, the viewer; her essence and where her essence exists is where we can begin to
extract meaning. Barthes states, “The knowledge in which this sign depends is heavily
cultural.”
43
This is to say that anything we see (the signs) will evoke an internal reaction in the
viewer’s understanding of that image. And what does it mean to see the other as the main
character, projected on a screen that is larger than life? The subject reserves the political right to
protect the identity of their image, from the death that comes with the new narratives in which
the environment of the image circulates.
44
In creating this alternative world, Cha has kept
Bernadette within the frame of her narrative, controlling the way we read/watch Permutations. In
contrast, popular cinema always seems to reflect the cultural trends of the time; the

42
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 4.
43
Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 154.
44
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10–15.
23
representation in cinema, television, video, and photography looked to put forth a hierarchy of
people and ideas.
45

To see the other through the platform of a screen in which they are subject is a way to
fantasize and create an alternate universe where the margin becomes the center. In agreement
with Krauss, “The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in
both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream
film. –A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only
exist as a counterpoint.”
46
Cha’s work has yet to become mainstream, even though other artists—
ranging from Lawrence Weiner to Jenny Holzer to Barbara Kruger—use text as a visual signifier
in their work. The rhetorical uses of language to question constructs of power are not just
purview of white artists /authors.
Permutations acknowledges the inadequacy of both photography and the written word.
Although she uses the camera to conceive Permutations, this does not mean Cha believes that
language is beyond itself, as her decision to omit text (captions, subtitles, film dialogue) makes
us wholly dependent on what we see. How one sees (not so much what we see) can be a
powerful social and political experience.

45
Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64.
46
Ibid., 59.
24
Chapter 3: Dictée, 1982

In the scope of Theresa Cha’s work, we can view Dictée as a novel that functions as an
amalgamation of her practice. Up until this point, it is evident that Cha had mastered the visual
representation of textual signifiers, and with the publication of Dictée, we see her grasp of
language(s) in its most powerful form. Published in 1982, the same year of her untimely death,
Dictée is an “interdisciplinary novel,” merging classical literature, Catholic liturgy, postcolonial
theory, poetry, photograph, and found images. Its genre is not easily definable. From its release,
it refused classification and categorization. As mentioned previously, Dictée is written in six
written languages: English, French, Korean, Chinese, Latin, and Ancient Greek. By nature, it is
both autobiographical and biographical, coalescing both text and image, historical and
contemporary content, and literature and poetry. Its narrative is not centered around one
character, rather it memorializes and recaptures events, thoughts, and beliefs around the themes
of immigration and dislocation of multiple women, some of which are familial, some of which
are idols, all through Cha’s writing. It is important to note that the Japanese language does not
make an appearance in Dictée, an important authoritative decision, as the book, in its
inconsistent moments, tells the affected story of the Japanese occupation in Korea. Thus, the
conscious decision to leave out Japanese, the language of the specific colonizer to Cha and her
family, is an attempt to imagine the world outside the language of the colonizer. On its own
terms, the book is a work of pain and grief, and transnational strife. Dictée evolves beyond and
above its own expectations: it seeks cultural recovery from its traumatic past. The year 1982 was
a year of artistic highs and personal lows; it was the year she made a name for herself (at this
point in her career, she was well known in the art world), and it was also the year she was
brutally murdered. Cha was aware of themes of life and death and the temporal quality of life.
25
Although her practice was deeply concerned with the manifestation of semiotics, the premises
that appeared in her work was the very idea of existence and existence through one’s memory
and collected identity.
In Dictée she writes, “She says to herself she could displace real time. She says to herself
she could display it before and become its voyeur. She says to herself that death would never
come, could not possibly. She knowing too that there was no displacing death, there was no
overcoming without the actual dying. She says to herself if she were able to write she could
continue to live. Says to herself if she would write without ceasing. To herself if by writing she
could abolish real time. She would live. If she could display it before her and become its
voyeur.”
47
In a sense, Cha is cognizant of her own mortality and the limited vernacular she had
as a human being. On this note, it is only fair to look at Dictée as a means to live, to stay alive.
Considered to be her most important work, Dictée is structured around the nine Greek
muses, all of whom are women. She enters the tradition of epic poetry evoking “muses” who are
not the Greek goddesses but contemporary women, either immediately related to Cha or studied
by Cha. To construct the story around classical literature is to legitimize the immigrant story. It is
ironic to think of Asian female characters embedded in this traditional literary structure. This
parallel and intertwining of myths and memoirs is revolutionary–through the mixing of genres
and time periods, Cha demands for the work to be authoritative–to be esteemed to a certain
degree. In thinking about Cha’s authorial position in her novel, I bring in Juliana Spahr’s text,
“Postmodernism, readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée.'([De]Colonizing
Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)” as reference. Spahr states that Dictée is a postmodernist text
as it is a “site for decolonization”; it does not rely on a single language, thus, by incorporating

47
Cha, Dictée, 140-141.
26
multiple language systems, Cha wakes the viewer-reader up from passive readership and into an
active one. The use of multiple languages forces the viewer-reader to engage with the text by
asking them to do the investigation to understand what was given to them. This kind of
interaction with the work becomes a political stroke, as the reader is immersed and forced into
uncovering cultural constructs unbeknownst to them.
48

Dictée begins with the Greek Muse Clio, representing History. Here, Cha addresses the
young Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon in the third person “you”. The second person is used
sporadically throughout Dictée, this reflects a direct conversation between the narrator and the
figures from the past and of the present. This second person is noticeably intimate when
compared to the mode of the third person, “they” which Cha uses occasionally to illustrate the
discomfort and judgement between her versus “them.” In Calliope (Epic Poetry) Cha’s mother,
Hyung Soon Huo, is also addressed in the second person, telling the story of her mother’s
immigration to Manchuria, China. As the story continues, Cha abruptly switches to the first-
person narrative “I”. This “I” is rather vague or not discernibly Theresa Hak Kyung Cha but is
only evident through first person’s relationship to her mother. In Urania (Astronomy), the “I”
persists as the narrator describes withdrawing blood from her arm. In Melpomene (Tragedy),
Cha appears as herself again, writing to her mother, “Our destination is fixed on the perpetual
motion of search. Fixed in its perpetual exile. Here at my return in eighteen years, the war is not
ended. We fight the same war. We are inside the same struggle seeking the same destination.”
49

In Erato (Love Poetry), we are quickly introduced to our fourth and fifth female characters,
Persephone, an actual Greek Goddess, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and Joan of Arc of France,
a heroine, martyr, and sanctified as Catholic saint. However, Joan of Arc “appears in this book

48
Spahr, "Postmodernism,” 1996.
49
Cha, Dictée, 81.
27
not as herself but rather as a reference to a film still of actress Maria Falconetti playing her in
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ and in a photograph of St. Therese of
Liseaux playing her in a convent play.”
50
It is here where Cha prioritizes the captured image
versus the real-life evocations. This chapter focuses on martyrdom more intensely, with
narratives alternating between the subject Joan of Arc to her mother again. In Elitere (Lyric
Poetry), the theme of alienation and the symbolic veil (reminiscent of Pomegranate Offering) is
employed and the story of Persephone is told in the third person. In Thalia (Comedy) focuses on
time and memory, collaging this section with letters, both typed and handwritten. In Terpsichore
(Choral Dance), Cha references her unfinished piece White Magnolia, a film project based in
South Korea with her brother James Cha, “You remain dismembered with the belief that
magnolia blooms white even on seemingly dead branches and you wait.”
51
In Polymnia (Sacred
Poetry), the narrator focuses on a woman taking water out of the well. The book concludes with
its last page shifting to the first person, while a child looks out the window, staring perceptively
into the world.
In reading, or rather translating, Dictée (as most of the experience of reading is also that
of translating, decoding, and discovering), it is evident that Cha is not interested in poetry as an
aesthetic means. Economical in her use of language, she does quite the opposite: writing
sentences that begin and yet are never finished, either in thought, concept, or syntax. Her play
here is disjointed, fragmented, and awkward. The reader’s work to read is not easy, neither is it
delightful. Without a multilingual background, the work is inaccessible and thus, incomplete.
The English speaker-reader may find themselves looking up and away from the book, taking
multiple breaks, becoming frustrated with the text’s inability to be seamless and whole. It is the

50
Spahr, "Postmodernism," 1996.
51
Cha, Dictée, 155.
28
small omissions of propositions and transitional verbs that take us out of our ritualistic world of
reading.
It is easy to write off Dictée as an academic text with a niche following; one does not
need to approach the text unless otherwise mandatory. And if one does make the conscious
decision to read it (out of pure interest), one is not obligated to read the entries that are not
coherent or legible to them. At the turn of a foreign language, the viewer-reader is disrupted from
their state of comprehension. Going back to the idea of decolonizing reading,
52
the resistance to
reading is emblematic of what Cha has continually addressed in her work: language as arbitrary
and yet, powerful. Spahr agrees, acknowledging that language can operate as a power strategy,
“Language acquisition clearly mimics colonialism in its tendency to overtake, to smooth a
difference - in agent or grammatical usage - into a uniform, seamless hegemony.”
53
These
colonial languages that hold so much meaning are alas, not meaningful. Cha writes in Urania,
“Phrases silent / Paragraphs silent / Pages and pages a little nearer / to movement / line / after
line / void to the left to the right. / Void the words. / Void the silence.
54
“One by one. / That
sounds. The sounds that move at a time stops. Starts again. Exceptions / stop and starts again / all
but exceptions. Broken speech. One to one. At a time. / Cracked tongue. Broken tongue. /
Pidgeon. Semblance of speech.”
55
As one can see, the reader may be challenged by the writing,
losing the will to read. In trying to unsettle our comprehension, Cha also presents the
oppositional course; what is even more detrimental when tolerating and accepting these
languages as one’s own or without question or refutation puts one’s liberty at stake. Though
captivity is the book’s current state of being, liberty is Cha’s ultimate aim. She does not give us

52
Cha, Dictée, 155.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid., 74.
55
Ibid., 75.
29
the privilege of “smoothing” over her difference, her otherness, and the otherness of the other
characters.
And yet, the text is deeply rooted in multiple histories, told in a(n) (auto)biographical
fiction. It is an archive of these transnational histories belonging not only to Cha, but to four
other women–some of these subjects less known than the others, all of whom hold intersectional
differences but all of whom are martyr’s in their individual narratives. Cha writes, “Why
resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. To
confess to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract
each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not
repeat history in oblivion.”
56
The poetic form is useful not only in dismantling the system of
language but it is also a type of literary encryption of information.
57
Again, we see the form of
the book, the page as a site for holding, where memoirs and antiquities can live without
interference. It is through the (artist) book that Cha activates and relinquishes without the
construct of time.
In “On Reading,” Barthes provides a systematic approach in which reading might be
interrogated (although he states that reading cannot be systemized). He states that, unlike
linguistics, reading has not determined its “pertinence.”
58
Reading is not utilized for one singular
object, but rather, one can read multiple objects, whether it is text, images, bodies, social
situations, etc. He states that the only universal characteristic of anything that is read is one’s
intention to read. He goes on to say that this intention is driven by desire or disgust to read.
59
I
agree that for someone who is curious to read Dictée or has already begun to read it, after a rude

56
Cha, Dictée, 33.
57
Stuart Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham, Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973).
58
Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 34.
59
Ibid., 34.
30
awakening of tirelessly decoding and translating (or trying to translate), the motivation to
continue and finish the book is a desire to find a knowledge that does not exist within
themselves. The reader will come to realize that whether or not they finish the book is not of
importance, but having experienced the book is itself a reckoning.
It is impossible to understand Dictée completely. To define its totality would be to
determine its end and to take from its beginning. Dictée begins as a rupture of thought, an urge to
create and adhere to newly invented symbols, to exists marginally yet radically from the
aggressor. Undoubtedly, the book exists as a site of revolution, mourning, and grief, not at the
expense of language but at the expense of memory. To utter a thought, we first must be able to
remember. And yet, to remember is not enough. The memory must be imprinted; it must be
made into an object to have a presence. As a writer, to recall a memory is also to invoke a reader.
If we stop trying to decode it, undress it, and find its unifying mandatory meaning, which does
not exist, then we can begin to liberate our experience. So perhaps we look at the disruption that
Spahr acknowledges as an opportunity to engage–rather than disengage with Cha. Does Dictée
want a participant in place of a reader? This could be so, if we look at the nine Greek myths it is
structurally embedded in, we see that the reader as subject is necessary. Barthes notes, “Greek
tragedy affords an example: the reader is that character who is on stage (even if clandestinely)
and who hears what each of the partners of the dialogue does not hear; his hearing is double (and
therefore virtually multiple).”
60

The end of Dictée is this very moment where the reader is fully aware of their potential
for radical liberation. Barthes explains that reading cannot be systemized, that reading is
inherently individualistic, “The most subjective reading imaginable is never anything but a game

60
Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 41-42.
31
played according to certain rules. Where do these rules come from? –These rules come from an
age-old logic of narrative, from a symbolic form which constitutes us even before we are born–in
a word, from that vast cultural space through which our person (whether author or reader) is only
one passage.”
61
If this one passage is opened and negotiated by a reader, then it is the by this
person that the text can signify an infinite historical and cultural space. It is the reader who keeps
the text alive. Barthes states:
To open the text, to posit the system of its reading, is therefore not only to ask and to
show that it can be interpreted freely; it is especially, and much more radically, to gain
acknowledgement that there is no objective or subjective truth of reading, but only a ludic
truth; –from which, however, all labor has evaporated: to read is to make our body work
–at the invitation of the text’s signs, of all the languages which traverse it and form
something like the shimmering depth of the sentence.
62

Meaning, the act of reading is embodied, it is a way to wake the body up from its trance of
composition and rules, it is a disassociation from regulated semiotics.
Reading is the body inventing its own narratives, its own agency. The reader summons
the text to life. If this is so, the end, the finality of the text, the definitive meaning must be what
the reader understands. If this is true, we can help Cha take the power away from grammatical
language and place the power in our hands, as readers. Should this not be the case for all of
postmodernity? Spahr states, “These diversions challenge readers to activate their
resourcefulness, to become their own linguists or translators. Dictée openly attacks one of the
major assumptions of reading: that the text is written as to be linguistically and culturally
transparent to the reader without recourse to the other systems of knowledge. The disruptive

61
Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 31.
62
Ibid., 31.
32
moments of untranslated or nonstandarized second language usage serve as subtle, temporal
shocks that jolt the reader out of abortive reading practices.”
63
This jolt Spahr talks about is
embedded in Cha’s use of alliteration and absence or the calling out of punctuations. For
example:
You see the color the hue the same you see the shape the form the same you the
unchangeable and the unchanged the same you filtered edited through progress and
westernization the same you see the numerals and innumerable bonding overlaid the
same, speech, the same. You see the will, you see see the breath, you see the out of breath
and out of will but you still see the will.
64

Here the “you” acts as a marker for the end, situated in the punctuation place of a period. The
visual image and the meaning of “you” is a cue for the reader to take part, to become aroused in
the act of reading and the decolonial act of actively positing one’s agency into one’s practice of
readership. Immense power lies in embodied readership.

63
Spahr, "Postmodernism," 1996
64
Cha, Dictée, 57.
33

Bibliography

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http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/camera-stylo-astruc.shtml. Originally published as
"Du Stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo," in L'Écran française (30 March 1948).

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

_____________. The Rustle of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

_____________. Image, Music, Text. Edited and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977.

Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. Berkeley:
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2008.

Hadfield, Gordon. "Sounding Time: Temporality, Typography, and Technology in Twentieth-
Century American Poetry." PhD. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2005.
http://hdl.handle.net/10477/45224.

Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham, UK: University
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Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64.

Lewallen, Constance, Lawrence Rinder, and Trinh T. Minh-Ha. The Dream of the Audience:
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34

Spahr, Juliana M. “Postmodernism, Readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 'Dictee.’ ”College
Literature 23, no. 3 (October 1996): 23–43.

Asset Metadata

Creator Sayarath, Kat (author)

Core Title Poetry as a political tool: text and image in the narrative of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/13/2018

Defense Date 04/13/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1970s,American studies,colonial languages,colonial resistance,curatorial practices,Dictée,Gender Studies,image,intersectionality,Language,Mouth to Mouth,OAI-PMH Harvest,permutations,poetics,Poetry,Pomegranate Offering,text,text and image,text as image,Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,visual culture

Language English

Advisor Campbell, Andrew (committee chair), Kim, Annette (committee member), Steiner, Rochelle (committee member)

Creator Email katsayarath@gmail.com,sayarath@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-5855

Unique identifier UC11669360

Identifier etd-SayarathKa-6246.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-5855 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SayarathKa-6246.pdf

Dmrecord 5855

Document Type Thesis

Rights Sayarath, Kat

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis poses questions concerning implicit hierarchies within language, looking at how it functions as a social and cultural barrier that subverts communication. By reducing text to symbols and units, rearranging text and using blank spaces on the page as signifiers, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha allows the viewer-reader to experience visual, written, and oral interactions beyond the boundaries of grammatical structure. Her radical approach to liberation (thus, redemption), through the use of poetry as a narrative entry allows diasporic subjects the political agency to work within and without the systems around them.