'Read as an uncanny work of remembrance and prefiguration, Dictee's polyphony of voices can be situated within a desiccated landscape of a Korean‑American mutated sublime, I will suggest, especially as this power of otherness gets displaced into unconscious sites and this process of repression‑and‑return has been narrated by (but by no means limited to the psychological discourse of) Sigmund Freud on 'The 'Uncanny.'' Language negotiates and enframes this uncanny recall and symbolization of pagan/Catholic forces in Cha. Nonetheless, as Frank suggests, 'the physical act becomes the ethical act' because 'to tell one's life is to assume responsibility for that life.' It also allows others to 'begin to speak through that story' (xx-xxi). The speech act is foregrounded in all three texts it is de-naturalized, deformed, shown as a recitation of prescribed language, and repeatedly interrupted. Cho and Hosu Kim published in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), all of which use the collage form to challenge the expectation that 'in life as in story, one event to another' (Frank 97). Drawing on affect studies, I analyze Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE (1982) alongside two essays, by Grace M. While the storytellers discussed by Frank mostly suffer from physical ailments and traumas, I would argue that the chaotic mode of telling also characterizes texts that explore other kinds of traumas, including those related to displacement and shaming experienced by several generations of Koreans and Americans of Korean descent.

Next to teleological stories of survival, which 'reassure the listener that however bad things look, a happy ending is possible', Frank discusses 'the chaos narrative' in which 'events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernible causality' (97).

In The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, sociologist Arthur Frank uses narra-tology to typologize the stories people tell about illness.

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha