{"product_id":"ambient-life-volume-81","title":"Ambient Life Volume 80","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRethinking the human through Melville's encounters with oceans, ecologies, and non-Western cosmologies\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAmbient Life\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eAmbient Life, \u003c\/i\u003eMelville'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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePushing the boundaries of scholarly form and content, \u003ci\u003eAmbient Life\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRetail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and\/or extended descriptions.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Minnesota Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56672947077464,"sku":"9781517920869","price":33.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781517920869_77c9b4f7-50a1-46a6-83db-f8685563f5d3.jpg?v=1779273047","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/ambient-life-volume-81","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}