Beyond the screen‐page: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee as a respiratory apparatus

Abstract Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1982), with its multilingual and multimodal complexity, has been extensively read within Asian American studies. Yet the field's early framing of the book as an experimental autobiography continues to dominate criticism, even where more recent work complicates that paradigm. This article argues that Dictee is better understood as an apparatus that reorganizes processes of subject formation than as an experimental autobiography. Framed in these terms, Dictee emerges in continuity with Cha's broader conceptual practice and in tension with the image‐saturated cultural milieu in which she worked. Through close readings of understudied sections of the text, the article traces these dynamics by drawing on postwar film theory and semiotics. It shows how Dictee figures the page as a screen that positions the reader as a voyeur, producing a crisis in the articulation of self and world, before exceeding this screen‐page through another mode of articulation grounded in breath and rhythm. In doing so, the article reconfigures Dictee as a media‐critical work and places it in a productive tension with accounts of the avant‐garde.