The Restorationist: Text One: A Collaborative Fiction by Jael B. Juba (Margins of Literature (Dis)) - Hardcover

Elbrecht, Joyce; Fakundiny, Lydia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0791415317 ISBN 13: 9780791415313

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1993

Synopsis

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 antebellum 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.

About this title

About the Author

The authors, Joyce Elbrecht and Lydia Fakundiny, live and work in Ithaca, New York; their fields are philosophy and literature respectively.

Reviews

This witty, labyrinthine postmodernist kaleidoscope is, among other things, a complex murder mystery, a feminist discourse and a metafictional riff on the possibilities of language and imagination. Elizabeth Harding, a strong-willed, divorced professor from upstate New York, buys a run-down historic house on Florida's Gulf Coast, planning to renovate it over the summer of 1977. On the day she takes possession, she stumbles on the corpse of the previous tenant. An old Creole woman rumored to practice voodoo is a suspect; her grandmother was the original owner of the house now believed to be haunted. The plot thickens when the body of a private eye dressed in a KKK robe is discovered--impaled on the fence surrounding Harding's property. Retired philosophy professor Elbrecht and Cornell English professor Fakundiny have created a fictive authorial persona, "Jael B. Juba," who interjects comments on the unfolding action. With referents ranging from Freud to Foucault to Greek myth and Hamlet , the text, a dazzling riot of exfoliating prose, deconstructs eros, selves and archetypes as it probes such themes as the trivialization of desire in a consumerist culture and the loss of individuality within a group.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791415317
• ISBN 13: 9780791415313
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 429