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Phenomenology of Passage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Meena Alexander
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Extract

In Dictee Theresa Cha, a Korean American Writer Who Died Tragically at the Age of Thirty-One, Shows Us How Dwelling in language can lead us to the truth of a radical instability. On the first page, she sets blocks of text in French and English one above the other, spelling out the terms for spacing and punctuation that a child might not understand. The English paragraph reads:

Open paragraph It was the first day period She had come from a far period tonight at dinner comma the families would ask comma open quotation marks How was the first day interrogation mark close quotation marks… . (1)

Type
correspondents at large
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Literature in the World , October 2016 , pp. 1519 - 1522
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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References

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