Ambient Life Volume 80 by Branka Arsic

Ambient Life Volume 80 by Branka Arsic

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.