Product details
- ISBN 9781517920869
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 152 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 16 Jun 2026
- Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Rethinking the human through Melville's encounters with oceans, ecologies, and non-Western cosmologies
Ambient Life offers a bold reimagining of Herman Melville's writing through the lens of ecology. Renowned literary critic Branka Arsić reframes Melville not just as a novelist but as an environmental thinker – one who reoriented the terms of human identity, perception, and relation. Rather than treating Melville's texts as separate literary objects, Arsić gathers them collectively to stage a philosophical meeting between Western Enlightenment epistemologies and the cosmologies of Polynesian and African traditions.
In Ambient Life, Melville's thinking becomes a site where vegetal, animal, and elemental images dissolve the distinction between inner life and outer world, yielding a radically relational form of individuation. Showing how Melville envisioned the human body not as a bounded, rational mind-container but as a porous, sensing organ infused with its surroundings, Arsić presents the mind as ambient rather than internal – a "coral psyche" shaped by atmospheric, aesthetic, and affective entanglements. Drawing from rich historical archives and ethnographic narratives, Arsić's archipelagic method mirrors this fluidity, traveling across oceans and epistemes to map a mode of thought.
Pushing the boundaries of scholarly form and content, Ambient Life is a resonant meditation on the unstable boundaries of the self that positions Melville as a witness to the ecological precarity of our time – and an unwitting ancestor of posthumanist thought.
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Branka Arsić is Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is coeditor, with Cary Wolfe, of The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (Minnesota, 2010) and author of several books, including Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau and On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson.
