The Restorationist: Text One
A Collaborative Fiction by Jael B. Juba
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Description
This is an American novel of formed chaos playfully enacting the centrality of language in late twentieth-century art and life through the voices of two women steeped in Western traditions, one telling the story of her restoration of an ante-bellum house on the Florida Gulf Coast, the other faithfully recording it but running culturally wild in the process.
In both literal and extended senses, The Restorationist is a mystery, with attendant bafflements, horrors, attempts to get to the bottom of things: mayhem and murder; artifices of trivialization by media, our technological doubles; arrangements of power in communities and in texts; signs and selves.
The authors, Joyce Elbrecht and Lydia Fakundiny, live and work in Ithaca, New York; their fields are philosophy and literature respectively.
Reviews
"The Restorationist: Text One is the real thing, a text of bliss: brilliant, seductive, deceitful. It's in dialogue with everybody, from the most recent post-structuralist theorists to its own readers, a thoroughly postmodern work that is also—and for the same reasons— in the great tradition of the European intellectual novel."—Molly Hite
"The Restorationist is a wonderful novel that does precisely what I think a novel should do—it engages questions of life and literature in a way that is entertaining, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally moving. The text works on so many levels simultaneously that there is much here for any reader to consider. Like all good fiction, it continues to function in the mind long after the reader has read the last page. My thanks to the author(s)." — Welch D. Everman
"Author! Author! The Restorationist could best be described as a Felliniesque staging of narrative voices on a fictional proscenium placed between the conventional backdrop of the traditional novel and the orchestral pit of academic criticism. An intensely funny encounter between a property owner and a woman of letters who together turn an ante-bellum house into a post-realist experiment. Very witty, very carefully wrought, it sets into motion a dialogic process which explodes public and private spaces of the haunted house of fiction. A delight to explore and make one's own!"—Nelly Furman