Ambient Life: Melville and the Ethereal Enlightenment
by Branka Arsić

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.

About the Author

Branka Arsić specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical and religious contexts. She is the author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016), which was awarded the MLA James Russell Lowell prize for the outstanding book of 2016. It discusses how Thoreau related mourning practices to biological life by articulating a complex theory of decay, and proposing a new understanding of the pathological. She has also written On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard University Press, 2010), and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (Stanford University Press, 2007). She co-edited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and (with Kim Evans) a collection of essays on Melville, entitled Melville’s Philosophies (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her work has appeared in such journals as Common Knowledge, Diacritics, ELH, J19, Leviathan, New England Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Prose, Qui Parle?, Representations, Telos and Textual Practice, and discusses such authors as Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze.

About the Speakers

Eduardo Cadava is the Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University, and an Associate Member of the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the School of Architecture, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He also serves on the Executive Committees of the Program in Media and Modernity, the Program in European Cultural Studies, the Program in Latin American Studies, and the Program in Jazz Studies.

Denise Cruz is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She writes and teaches about gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures. She uses spatial and geographic frameworks (from the transpacific, to the regional, to the Global South) to examine previously unstudied archives (from the first works of English literature by Filipina and Filipino authors, to private papers that document connections between the Midwest and U. S. empire, to fashion shows in Manila).

Matthew Hart is the Chair and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Hart specializes in 20th- and 21st-century English literature, with an emphasis on modernism, poetry, contemporary writing, and literary theory. He is also interested in connections between literature and the visual arts, as well as those between literary history and political history.

Rosalind C. Morris is a Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Rosalind Morris’ work is addressed to the histories and social lives—including the deaths and afterlives—produced in the interstices of industrial and resource-based capitalism in the Global South. Those interests extend to the technological and media forms that attend or undergird these economies, and the forms of subjectivity produced in their midst. Morris’ recent writings on these subjects are grounded in deep ethnographic research in Southern Africa, an engagement that now stretches over more than two and a half decades; her early work was centered on mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand.

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