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.