In 1997, with the resurgence of Asian American studies and Third-wave feminism, the book was brought back into print by Norma Alarcón and Third Woman Press.

It has an unorthodox structure, and consists of descriptions of the struggle to speak, uncaptioned photographs, tellings of the lives of saints and patriots, and mysterious letters that seem not to relate to the other material.

Cha "borrows from avant garde and film editing techniques such as jagged cuts, jump shots, and visual exposition", based on her experience in the video and performing arts.

[5] The narrator's fragmented memories suggest an ambiguous Korean identity contending with the presence of an awkwardly fashioned American one.

The catalogue of nine muses Cha examines with nine women characters, vary widely from "Greek goddesses to a Korean shamanistic matriarch and from historical figures to fictional ones".

[6] The meaning of the muses is shown with nine women who all reject patriarchal roles and cannot have a voice for themselves for different reasons, because of unhappy marriage, exile, turbulence and immigration.

Cha wants to keeps a realist ideal of equivalence and deliberately get rid of the sense of foreignness without extra translation, though these characters stand outside the textual order, instead, they create "self-contained diatinction and feeling of otherness".

The stories of the women in the book (including Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and her mother Hyun Soon Huo) focus on patriotism and exile identity.

Though it is uncaptioned, the photograph of Cha's biological mother, Hyung Soon Huo, conveys the ways the past speaks to "escape the capture of discursive language" with this historical character.

[8] She also uses a still from the silent French movie called The Passion of Joan of Arc to give readers a direct concept of what is going on in the text.

So readers could think about the reliability of narration and focalization,[9] multimedia and art,[10][11] the ambiguity[12] and authenticity in photography taking,[13] and the boundary between fiction and nonfiction.

[14] Critics have read the book as a social discourse, aiming at informing the readers of the world about the history of the Japanese Colonial Period.

Cha managed to call the public's attention to this kind of special group; at the same time, she also invites those who have the same experience or background to find their own cultural identity.

Dictée is famous for its unique print format and typographic design, using untranslated French, Korean, Chinese, collage and fragmented text in the book.

"In 1934 Ugaki introduced a new curriculum in Korean schools that featured increased instruction in Japanese language, ethics, and history.

The suggestion to choose the 38th parallel as dividing line became part of an instruction, approved by the Presi-dent, to General MacArthur, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces.