Ambient Life Volume 80

<P><B>Rethinking the human through Melville's encounters with oceans, ecologies, and non-Western cosmologies</B></P><P><I>Ambient Life</I> 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.</P><P>In <I>Ambient Life, </I>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.</P><P>Pushing the boundaries of scholarly form and content, <I>Ambient Life</I> 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.</P><P><B>Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.</B></P>