Timothy Morton
| Timothy Morton | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Timothy Bloxam Morton 19 June 1968 London, England |
| Alma mater | Magdalen College, Oxford |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | American philosophy |
| School | Speculative realism |
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Main interests
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Metaphysics, realism, ecotheory, object-oriented ontology, Buddhism |
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Notable ideas
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Hyperobjects, realist magic, mesh, strange strangers |
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Influences
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Timothy Bloxam Morton (born 19 June 1968) is 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. 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.
Morton has also written extensively about the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, Romanticism, diet studies, and ecotheory.
Morton received a B.A. and D.Phil. in English from Magdalen College, Oxford. His 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."
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. His 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.
In 1995, Morton published Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World, an extension of the ideas presented in his 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. 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.
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