Deployed In Cha's Dicte By Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

For many readers, epic literature draws up in our minds a tale of heroic deeds and infamous rogues; gods and royalty and mighty wars. Thanks to famous works such as Aristotle's Poetics, these epic literatures are often strictly associated with poetry. However, many have petitioned that Dictée, published in 1932 by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, is a form of epic literature despite its departure from traditional writing styles. From an Aristotelian perspective, in which the author is confined to guidelines defining how ideas may be presented, Dictée is not an epic piece of writing. Despite this contradiction, I contend that Cha’s Dictée should be considered a contemporary piece of epic literature, due to its related but separate narratives which in

Throughout the novel, no consistent style, structure, or even fonts are employed. In respect to the nine greek Muses, Dictée is organized into nine different sections, featuring those such as Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), and Thalia (comedy). Each chapter is separated from the other, and each follows a different story that relates to one another through the experiences of Cha and those she knew. Whether Dictée is a piece of epic literature is a source of debate for scholars today, but one of the authors of our previous readings, Aristotle, would wholly believe that Dictée does not meet the set

The most obvious example of this in Dictée lies within Erato’s section, titled as love poetry. Throughout the section, which follows the feelings of unnamed woman whose husband has cheated on her, Cha uses the arrangement of the words on the page to express the woman’s emotions. On each page, there is up to several sections missing from the left side of the book, which have been shifted over to the even-numbered page. Where the missing phrases should be, there are only gaps. White emptiness. I think Cha uses this to illustrate that the woman is feeling disjointed and to illustrate that this man she used to love has broken her into pieces. The reader could also, I think, interpret this in another way: The two halves of each page are not together as they should be, and thus seem empty because of it. Only together are they whole, just as two separated lovers are not whole when they are apart, either physically or emotionally. By utilizing this technique, Cha creates a new narrative within Dictée, one in which the narrator is not the author herself, but rather the literal textual space surrounding her characters. In this way, Cha actually expands on how an epic can tell a story and enables her epic to express ideas in formats beyond what is possible in the constraints of an Aristotelian