Postcolonial Gothic Elements in Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

Nick Joaquin (Nicomedes Márquez Joaquín, (1917-2004) is known for his unique style of writing, tropical Gothic, and applying gothic elements in his stories and novels. This paper examines his first novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels through the lens of postcolonial theory. The paper also investigates gothic narratives in his novel by applying David Punter’s literary-historical approach. Punter (2000), in his book Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, examines the metamorphoses of the Gothic as a genre in some selected novels and poems. The book depicts new manifestations of the Gothic during 20th century literature. This paper attempts to investigate how the elements of postcolonial Gothic as discussed by Punter are manifested in Joaquin’s novel. In doing so, the contrapuntal method of reading, introduced by Edward Said (1993), is also applied to explore the hidden parts of history in the novel.

Utopian View of the World: Modern Studies. Review: Utopian Discourse in Russian Culture of the Late 19th – 21st Century. Literature. Painting. Cinema. Monograph. Moscow, Flinta Publ., 2021, 281 p. (in Russ.)

The author analyzes the monograph “Utopian discourse in Russian culture of the late 19th – 21st century. Literature. Painting. Cinema”. The review determines the position of this book in modern science of projective models of the future. A key aspect is the continuity of previous studies on the category of utopia, and above all, B. F. Egorov, whose memory the book is dedicated to. The transition of modern art beyond the utopian genre is noticed. This confirms the appropriateness of the discursive technique. The author emphasizes the relevance of the traditional conversation about environmental problems and expresses bewilderment at the disregard by Western philologists of Russian fiction and scientific literature. As an unquestionable advantage of the monograph, its modern anthropological approach to the psychological details of private narrative utopias is noted.