Village Green Shopping Centre | Vernon's Premier Shopping Destination
Choice Made Simple!
Too many options?Click below to purchase an online gift card that can be used at participating retailers in Village Green Shopping Centre and continue your shopping IN CENTRE!Purchase Here
Coles Ambient Life: Melville and the Ethereal Enlightenment at Village Green Shopping Centre in Vernon, BC
*Product information may vary - to confirm product availability, pricing, shipping and return information please contact Coles
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.
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.
Find everything in-store including new, used and children’s books, music, movies, games and toys. Visit Coles today to find the perfect gift, or a novel for yourself. COVID-19 UPDATE: Open | Regular Centre Hours
