Timothy Morton

Later, Morton edited Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1790-1820 (2000), a three-volume compendium of eighteenth century texts examining the literary, sociocultural, and political history of food, including works on intoxication, cannibalism, and slavery.

Employing a 'prescriptive' analysis of various Romantic texts, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), Morton argues that the figurative rhetorical elements of these texts should be read not simply as clever language play, but as commands to establish consumptive practices that challenge ideological configurations of how the body relates to normativity.

For Morton, authoritarian power dynamics, commodity flows, industrial logic, and the distinction between the domains of nature and culture are inhered in the 'discourses of diet' articulated by the Shelleys.

In turn, Shelleyan prose regarding forms of consumption, particularly vegetarianism, is read as a call for social reform and figurative discussions of intemperance and intoxication as warnings against tyranny.

Additionally, Morton has edited two critical volumes on the Shelleyan corpus.

Timothy Bloxam Morton (born 19 June 1968) is a professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University.

A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton's work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies.

In 1995, Morton published Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World, an extension of the ideas presented in their doctoral dissertation.

Investigating how food came to signify ideological outlook in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Morton's book is an attempt at 'green' cultural criticism, whereby bodies and the social or environmental conditions in which they appear are shown to be interrelated.

Morton's use of the term 'hyperobjects' was inspired by Björk's 1996 single 'Hyperballad', although the term 'Hyper-objects' (denoting n-dimensional non-local entities) has also been used in computer science since 1967.

Morton uses the term to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam.

Their recent book Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People explores the separation between humans and non-humans and from an object-oriented ontological perspective, arguing that humans need to radically rethink the way in which they conceive of, and relate to, non-human animals and nature as a whole, going on to explore the political implications of such a change.

Morton has also written extensively about the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, Romanticism, diet studies, and ecotheory.

Morton is faculty in the Synthetic Landscapes postgraduate program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Morton received a B.A. and D.Phil.

in English from Magdalen College, Oxford.

Their doctoral dissertation, "Re-Imagining the Body: Shelley and the Languages of Diet," studied the representation of diet, temperance, and consumption in the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

According to Morton, the decision to study English literature, as opposed to more academically fashionable classics, stemmed from a desire to engage with modes of thought evolving internationally "including all kinds of continental philosophy that just wasn't happening much in England at the time, what with the war against 'theory' and all."

From 2000 to 2004, Morton published three works dealing with the intersection of food and cultural studies.

In the first of these to be published, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (2000), Morton unpacked the evolution of European consumer culture through an analysis of the figurative use of spice in Romantic literature.

Viewing spice as a cultural artifact that functioned "as discourse, not object, naively transparent to itself" during the Romantic period, they elucidate two general characteristics of the poetics of spice: materiality and transumption.

The 'materiality' of spice connects its symbolic and social roles with its capacity for desire production.

Morton cites the "trade winds topos" (perfumed breeze believed to waft from exotic lands in which spices are domestic) in Milton's Paradise Lost as an example, concluding that Milton prefigures the symbolic use of spice in later works by presenting Satan's journey from Hell to Chaos as a parallel to the travels of spice traders.

In contrast, 'transumption', following Harold Bloom's deployment of the rhetorical concept, entails the use of a metasignifier that "serves as a figure for poetic language itself."

According to Morton, the works of John Dryden exemplify transumption, revealing "a novel kind of capitalist poetics, relying on the representation of the spice trade...Spice is not a balm, but an object of trade, a trope to be carried across boundaries, standing in for money: a metaphor about metaphor."

Carrying this idea forward to the Romantic era, Morton critiques the manner in which spice became a metaphor for exotic desire that, subsequently, encapsulated the self-reflexivity of modern processes of commodification.

In 2002, they published a compilation of critical and historical reflections on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein entitled Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Routledge Study Guide and Sourcebook.

They also edited Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (2004), a collection of essays that problematizes the use of taste and appetite as Romantic metaphors for bounded territories and subjectivities, while empirically interrogating the organization of Romantic cultural and economic structures around competing logics of consumption.

Then, in 2006, Morton edited The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, an interdisciplinary overview of Percy Bysshe Shelley's themes, language, narrative structure, literary philosophy, and political views.

Since 2009, Morton has engaged in a sustained project of ecological critique, primarily enunciated in two works, Ecology Without Nature (2009) and The Ecological Thought (2010), through which they problematize environmental theory from the standpoint of ecological entanglement.

In Ecology Without Nature, Morton proposes that an ecological criticism must be divested of the bifurcation of nature and civilization, or the idea that nature exists as something that sustains civilization, but exists outside of society's walls.

As Morton states:

"Ecological writing keeps insisting that we are 'embedded' in nature. Nature is a surrounding medium that sustains our being. Due to the properties of the rhetoric that evokes the idea of a surrounding medium, ecological writing can never properly establish that this is nature and thus provide a compelling and consistent aesthetic basis for the new worldview that is meant to change society. It is a small operation, like tipping over a domino... Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration."

Viewing "nature," in the putative sense, as an arbitrary textual signifier, Morton theorizes artistic representations of the environment as sites for opening ideas of nature to new possibilities.

Seeking an aesthetic mode that can account for the differential, paradoxical, and nonidentificational character of the environment, they propose a materialist method of textual analysis called 'ambient poetics', in which artistic texts of all kinds are considered in terms of how they manage the space in which they appear, thereby attuning the sensibilities of their audience to forms of natural representation that contravene the ideological coding of nature as a transcendent principle.

Historicizing this form of poetics permits the politicization of environmental art and its 'ecomimesis', or authenticating evocation of the author's environment, such that the experience of its phenomena becomes present for and shared with the audience.

Art is also an important theme in The Ecological Thought, a "prequel" to Ecology Without Nature, in which Morton proposes the concept of 'dark ecology' as a means of expressing the "irony, ugliness, and horror" of ecology.

Before obtaining a professorship at Rice University, in 2012, Morton previously taught at the University of California, Davis, New York University and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Morton's theoretical writings espouse an eclectic approach to scholarship.

Their subjects include the poetry and literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, the cultural significance and context of food, ecology and environmentalism, and object-oriented ontology (OOO).