{"product_id":"ambient-life-melville-and-the-ethereal-enlightenment","title":"Ambient Life","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\u003e 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.\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":"Unity Books","offers":[{"title":"Ambient Life Melville and the Ethereal Enlightenment","offer_id":46680260378821,"sku":null,"price":75.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0625\/6679\/3413\/files\/978-1-5179-2086-9.jpg?v=1786321114","url":"https:\/\/unitybooks.myshopify.com\/products\/ambient-life-melville-and-the-ethereal-enlightenment","provider":"Unity Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}