Ambient Life Volume 80
Melville and the Ethereal Enlightenment
Seiten
2026
University of Minnesota Press (Verlag)
978-1-5179-2086-9 (ISBN)
University of Minnesota Press (Verlag)
978-1-5179-2086-9 (ISBN)
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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.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
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.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
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.
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 23.9.2026 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Posthumanities |
| Zusatzinfo | 47 black and white illustrations |
| Verlagsort | Minnesota |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 203 mm |
| Gewicht | 652 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-5179-2086-8 / 1517920868 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-5179-2086-9 / 9781517920869 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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Buch | Hardcover (2023)
De Gruyter (Verlag)
CHF 83,90
