Boxed before the ink was dry, the copies of HOTEL stuck together nearly three decades later, separating one for further study requires tearing it from the pack, unavoidably damaging the glossy cover. Courtesy Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial FoundationĮxilée and Temps Morts first appeared, together, in the anthology HOTEL, published in 1980 by the New York–based Tanam Press. Even readers unacquainted with Dictée will be rewarded with an unusual story-one as gripping as anything in Cha’s most famous and fully realized work. But the collection isn’t only for completists and converts. Those who have heeded Dictée’s complicated call will find much to savor in the writings in Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works: Cha’s adventurous spirit is present in even the least of these works, a breath of a bygone avant-garde that still hits its mark with astonishing frequency. The epigraph is from Sappho, whose surviving work consists almost solely of fragments. Language breaks down, starts up, transposes itself from French to English, becomes a deadpan grammar lesson. An anatomical illustration of the chest and throat is followed by a map of divided Korea.

Recto and verso narratives interlock, the text of one page fitting erotically into the white space on the other. Yet despite its somber tone, Dictée is not a tomb, but something that remains vividly alive: an explosion of high-wire techniques and wide-ranging influences, a feat of historical imagination, a multimedia display, an eloquent stutter. Every sentence is haunted by what is about to be. Over a quarter century after the book’s publication, that shadow has soaked into its very fibers. From the very first edition, then, everyone encountering Dictée has incorporated this grim fact into the reading experience. Is a crossed-out line or seeming typo in fact some intimation of wordplay, language on the verge of creative unraveling?Ĭha was only thirty-one when she was murdered in New York on November 5, 1982, shortly before the publication of Dictée. Indeed, for an artist so committed to permutations of language-to literally mincing words, teasing meanings from amputations, one character at a time-every letter counts. Since there will be no new writing from the late author, every word counts. For a writer whose most visible work, Dictée, brims with saints and martyrdom and the possibilities of productive anguish, it’s fitting that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s disparate uncollected writings-everything from artists’ books to typewritten disjecta membra-should give off the refulgent glow of relics set against plain white cloth.

Theresa hak kyung cha books