Habitat Recovery: The Don Valley in Alissa York’s Fauna

Autor: Misao Dean
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Canadian Studies. 54:137-152
ISSN: 1911-0251
0021-9495
DOI: 10.3138/jcs.2019-0016
Popis: The setting of Alissa York’s 2010 novel Fauna, in the Don Valley and its adjacent neighbourhoods of Leslieville and Riverdale, provides a context for the theme of the persistence of life in the midst of waste and destruction. The realist setting of Fauna demonstrates the way the novel values the local and its specific characteristics, and in doing so suggests the way it seeks to reconcile the opposition identified by Susie O’Brien between ecocritical and post-colonial perspectives in contemporary fiction. At once biocentric, multicultural, and urban, the Don Valley setting undermines the discourses of “‘natural’ belonging that are seen to smack dangerously of colonialist forms of essentialism” because its history as a reclaimed habitat (“naturalized” rather than restored) acknowledges that it is a constructed space rather than a natural wilderness. The novel’s shifting narrative perspective includes animal perspectives along with human and reinforces their interconnection, raising the dodgy question of animal subjectivity and entering into dialogue with the genre of the animal story. But rather than projecting human subjectivity onto animals, Fauna makes an ethical choice to recognize the bodily specificity and precarity that humans and animals share. The flourishing of animal and plant life in the “naturalized” Don Valley provides companionship and recognition for the human characters in the novel who frequent the valley in their struggle to overcome trauma, loss, and abuse.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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