Timothy Morton
Biographic Data
| ID | 157223 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Timothy Morton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Timothy |
| FAMILY NAME | Morton |
| SIGNATURE | MORTON T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rice University |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-4168-579X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 177 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Exposed: How to Enjoy Living Ugly Truths on a Changing Planet
Climate change provokes moral, ethical and political (and aesthetic) reactions that have to do with guilt and shame. The upscaling of guilt and shame to Earth magnitude brings huge risks and huge creative opportunities. It’s best to realize that guilt and shame are what make us human, indeed what make us conscious beings as such. There is no way to rid ourselves of this “structural guilt.” Knowing this brings much relief and inspires us to engage…
The Sight of a Feather in a Peacock's Tail
Smiles are made of tears
In this essay I commemorate the work I have done with Nicholas Royle, the time we spent together in Houston and London, and my friendship with him
Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology
Subjunctivity
We explore the value of the subjunctive mood as a template for understanding ethical action and the theological ontology that undergirds it. We do this by examining the use of a strange but very precisely used word in the writing of a theologian and minister and poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "silly." We do so in the name of exploring the value of contingency, accidentality and abjection to a general theory of ecological thought
The role of pain intensity and depressive symptoms in the relationship between sleep quality and postural control among middle-aged and older adults with Fibromyalgia
OBJECTIVE: Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic pain condition often accompanied by sleep problems and depression that are each associated with reduced physical ability including postural control. Research supports a sequential association between pain intensity and depression in FM, and poor sleep quality may play a key role in this relationship. This study aimed to verify a serial pattern of associations among sleep quality, pain intensity, and depre…
Even the Plague Journal: Everything Is Happening Extracts (1)
These are the first published extracts of a Covid-19 diary, co-written over two years (2020–22). The authors are concerned to both record and analyse the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic altered the sense and experience of inside and outside, home and world, self and other. Grief—both personal and ecological—is uncircumventable. At the same time, the virus provokes critical thinking on how ‘another life is possible’. Literature and music are k…
Sélection thématique de livres
Cette rubrique signale des ouvrages rcemment parus. Ils sont classs en trois catgories : les ouvrages thmatiques par objet d'tude ; les ouvrages sur la science et ses rapports avec la socit ; les ouvrages de rflexion sur les sciences. Pour une description plus dtaille, cliquez sur le titre
Keskkondlus / Environmentalism
Reproduced only in the print version of the journal Methis with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear
Being Ecological
This title has been withdrawn from MIT Press Direct. Please follow the "Buy in Print Options" link for other ways to obtain this book. A book about ecology without information dumping, guilt inducing, or preaching to the choir.Don't care about ecology? You think you don't, but you might all the same. Don't read ecology books? This book is for you. Ecology books can be confusing information dumps that are out of date by the time they hit you. Slap…
Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality
We take for granted that only certain kind of things exist – electrons but not angels, passports but not nymphs. This is what we understand as ‘reality’. But in fact, ‘reality’ varies with each era of the world, in turn shaping the field of what is possible to do, think and imagine. Our contemporary age has embraced a troubling and painful form of reality: Technic. Under Technic, the foundations of reality begin to crumble, shrinking the field of…
Third Stone from the Sun
Hyperobjets
Le déréglement climatique est sans doute l'exemple le plus dramatique d'« hyperobjet », à savoir d'entités de dimensions temporelles et spatiales si disproportionnées à nos habitudes de perception que nos cadres de pensée et de compréhension s'en trouvent déjoués. Cet article explique ce que sont les hyperobjets et évoque leur impact sur nos modes de pensée ainsi que sur les façons dont nous devons apprendre à coexister. Les hyperobjets nous forc…
How to Make Hyperobject Sound Art: Occupying the Electromagnetic Field with the Firesign Theatre
Research Article| July 01 2018 How to Make Hyperobject Sound Art: Occupying the Electromagnetic Field with the Firesign Theatre Jeremy Braddock; Jeremy Braddock Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and Rice University, Houston, Texas Jeremy Braddock is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Modernist Studies Association …
Spectral Depth
Deep ecology holds that profound inner transformation is a necessary part of entering an ecological age and building a society that includes nonhuman lifeforms in meaningful ways. I am going to argue that this is definitely the case, and that the shock of realizing the truth of the Anthropocene amounts to a first step on a pathway that one might accurately see as ‘spiritual,’ if only for its profundity—though certainly not for any disengagement w…
Sarah Wood, Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces
And the Leg Bone's Connected to the Toxic Waste Dump Bone
Ecological images—the fragile web of life, NASA 's “blue marble” Earth, everything being connected—appeal to our love for the planet's being and our faith that there is still hope, if we can just care enough. But this imagery is neither true nor false. In other words, when we visualize these sorts of things, we don't know what we're talking about! We think we do. But what is this wholeness really, are we actually parts of it, and what kind of par…
Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence
Timothy Morton explores the foundations of the ecological crisis to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and rediscover playfulness and joy. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think.
Queer Green Sex Toys
Research Article| March 01 2016 Queer Green Sex Toys Timothy Morton Timothy Morton Rice University [email protected] Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and has collaborated with Björk, Haim Steinbach and Olafur Eliasson. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (2015), Hyperobjects: Philo…
The Cambridge Companion to ‘Frankenstein
The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein consists of sixteen original essays on Mary Shelley's novel by leading scholars, providing an invaluable introduction to Frankenstein and its various critical contexts. Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this volume relates Frankenstein to various social, literary, scientific and historical contexts, and outlines how critical theories such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, and queer theory generate…
Dark ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence
"Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are. The logistics…
This Biosphere Which Is Not One: Towards Weird Essentialism
This essay uses the thought of Luce Irigaray as a very powerful way to imagine what ecological beings such as meadows and whales are like. For reasons given yet implicit in Irigaray's work, it is possible to extend what she argues about woman to include any being whatsoever. In particular, it is shown that to exist is to defy the so-called law of noncontradiction. Various paradoxes demonstrate that in order to care for beings that we consider to …
Practising Deconstruction in the Age of Ecological Emergency
Deconstruction and/as Ecology
This article examines the relevance of the concept of deconstruction to ecocriticism. It discusses Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and contends that deconstruction is not nominalism because it tells us something profound about our actual universe. It argues that deconstruction is the ‘secret best friend’ of ecocriticism, despite how some versions of ecocriticism want to rough up deconstruction, and explains that, like evolution, deconstruction r…
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Term Anthropocene
Not a day goes by in the 2010s without some humanities scholars becoming quite exercised about the term Anthropocene . In case we need reminding, Anthropocene names the geological period starting in the later eighteenth century when, after the invention of the steam engine, humans began to deposit layers of carbon in Earth’s crust. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term has been current since 2000. 1 In 1945, there occurred “The Great Accelerati…
Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality
This book is dedicated to my son Simon.Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children
Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of that most writers on the topic promote: they propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the nature they revere. The problem is a symptom of a far deeper situation - of accepting the idea of ecology without That is, to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish, once…
The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness
The Anthropocene is the radical intersection of human history and geological time. Humans have belatedly realised that they have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale. This creeping realisation has an Oedipal logic, that is to say, it is a strange loop in which one level of activity—industrial agriculture and the swiftly ensuing industrial revolution—crosses into an entirely new level of planetary force and, following from that, an unca…
Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology
The further scholarship investigates life forms (ecology, evolutionary biology and microbiology) the less those forms can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. The further scholarship delves into texts (deconstruction) the less they too can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. This similarity is not simply an analogy. Life forms cannot be said to differ in a rigorous way from texts. On many levels and …
Ecology without the Present
The fact of the Anthropocene makes the metaphysics of presence radically unthinkable. At the same time, and for the same reasons, it reveals to humans a non-totalisable set of unique beings, which this essay calls objects. These objects have a past and a future, but no present
An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry
This essay is one of the first to explore the implications of the emerging philosophy known as object-oriented ontology (OOO) for the study and creation of poetry. OOO provides a powerful conceptual toolbox for understanding how poetry works. Furthermore, poetry itself may be seen as a template for understanding how any entity-a human, a ball of string, a star cluster-can interact with any other-a toaster, an octopus, an abandoned warehouse. This…
Poisoned Ground
Poisoned Ground:Art and Philosophy in the Time of Hyperobjects Timothy Morton (bio) Global warming is a manifestation of the Anthropocene, the moment at which human history has intersected decisively with geological time. Since the later eighteenth century, humans began to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust. The fossil fuel burning that caused this has given rise to logarithmic increases in Earth's average temperature. In this essay,…
Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry
Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Term Anthropocene
Not a day goes by in the 2010s without some humanities scholars becoming quite exercised about the term Anthropocene . In case we need reminding, Anthropocene names the geological period starting in the later eighteenth century when, after the invention of the steam engine, humans began to deposit layers of carbon in Earth’s crust. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term has been current since 2000. 1 In 1945, there occurred “The Great Accelerati…
Victorian Hyperobjects
This Biosphere Which Is Not One: Towards Weird Essentialism
This essay uses the thought of Luce Irigaray as a very powerful way to imagine what ecological beings such as meadows and whales are like. For reasons given yet implicit in Irigaray's work, it is possible to extend what she argues about woman to include any being whatsoever. In particular, it is shown that to exist is to defy the so-called law of noncontradiction. Various paradoxes demonstrate that in order to care for beings that we consider to …
Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals
Ecologocentrism:Unworking Animals Timothy Morton (bio) . . . with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. —Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Pla…
How to Make Hyperobject Sound Art: Occupying the Electromagnetic Field with the Firesign Theatre
Research Article| July 01 2018 How to Make Hyperobject Sound Art: Occupying the Electromagnetic Field with the Firesign Theatre Jeremy Braddock; Jeremy Braddock Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and Rice University, Houston, Texas Jeremy Braddock is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Modernist Studies Association …
Deconstruction and/as Ecology
This article examines the relevance of the concept of deconstruction to ecocriticism. It discusses Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and contends that deconstruction is not nominalism because it tells us something profound about our actual universe. It argues that deconstruction is the ‘secret best friend’ of ecocriticism, despite how some versions of ecocriticism want to rough up deconstruction, and explains that, like evolution, deconstruction r…
More Books about Buildings and Food
George Eliot lamented the decoration of her and George Henry Lewes's house, for which Owen Jones, the man behind the color scheme for the Crystal Palace, designed wallpaper and chose draperies. At the beginning of his chapter on Middlemarch in Novels Behind Glass , a detailed historicist study of Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot and the Great Exhibition, Andrew Miller quotes Eliot's lament: “Such fringing [sic] away of precious life in thinking…
Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World
Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry
Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite
Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brings two major critical impulses within the field of Romanticism to bear upon an important and growing field of research: appetite and its related discourses o
Of Matter and Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge's ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’
In this essay, Timothy Morton explores ecological ways of reading Coleridge's poem ‘Effusion 35’, which he revised as ‘The Eolian Harp’. Previous criticism (such as M. H. Abrams's) has suggested that the Aeolian harp is a way of thinking about relationships between humans and nature, but how precisely should we define these? And do these definitions have anything to do with artistic form (as well as content)? Morton demonstrates that Coleridge co…
Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals
Ecologocentrism:Unworking Animals Timothy Morton (bio) . . . with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. —Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Pla…
Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of that most writers on the topic promote: they propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the nature they revere. The problem is a symptom of a far deeper situation - of accepting the idea of ecology without That is, to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish, once…
The Ecological Thought
In this passionate, lucid, and surprising book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does 'Nature' exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what Morton cal…
Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology
The further scholarship investigates life forms (ecology, evolutionary biology and microbiology) the less those forms can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. The further scholarship delves into texts (deconstruction) the less they too can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. This similarity is not simply an analogy. Life forms cannot be said to differ in a rigorous way from texts. On many levels and …
Waking Up Inside an Object: The Subject of Ecology
Research Article| September 01 2011 Waking Up Inside an Object: The Subject of Ecology Timothy Morton Timothy Morton University of California [email protected] Timothy Morton is professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard University Press, 2007), seven other books and over seventy essays…
Here Comes Everything
Research Article| December 01 2011 Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology Timothy Morton Timothy Morton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2011) 19 (2): 163–190. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0163 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Timothy Morton; Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology. Qui Parle 1 December 2011; 19 (2)…
Practising Deconstruction in the Age of Ecological Emergency
What, I hear you ask? How can you put the word ‘practice’ next to the most cerebral, recherché word in philosophy and cultural theory? And how, for goodness’ sake, can I expect you to take it seriously in a volume about teaching ecological criticism, for heaven’s sake? By the time you finish reading this essay, however, you may well agree with its author that you can indeed make deconstruction a matter of experience, hands-on, even ‘raw’ and ‘nak…
Ecology without the Present
The fact of the Anthropocene makes the metaphysics of presence radically unthinkable. At the same time, and for the same reasons, it reveals to humans a non-totalisable set of unique beings, which this essay calls objects. These objects have a past and a future, but no present
The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness
The Anthropocene is the radical intersection of human history and geological time. Humans have belatedly realised that they have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale. This creeping realisation has an Oedipal logic, that is to say, it is a strange loop in which one level of activity—industrial agriculture and the swiftly ensuing industrial revolution—crosses into an entirely new level of planetary force and, following from that, an unca…
From modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry
An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry
This essay is one of the first to explore the implications of the emerging philosophy known as object-oriented ontology (OOO) for the study and creation of poetry. OOO provides a powerful conceptual toolbox for understanding how poetry works. Furthermore, poetry itself may be seen as a template for understanding how any entity-a human, a ball of string, a star cluster-can interact with any other-a toaster, an octopus, an abandoned warehouse. This…
Poisoned Ground
Poisoned Ground:Art and Philosophy in the Time of Hyperobjects Timothy Morton (bio) Global warming is a manifestation of the Anthropocene, the moment at which human history has intersected decisively with geological time. Since the later eighteenth century, humans began to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust. The fossil fuel burning that caused this has given rise to logarithmic increases in Earth's average temperature. In this essay,…
Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality
This book is dedicated to my son Simon.Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children
Practising Deconstruction in the Age of Ecological Emergency
Deconstruction and/as Ecology
This article examines the relevance of the concept of deconstruction to ecocriticism. It discusses Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and contends that deconstruction is not nominalism because it tells us something profound about our actual universe. It argues that deconstruction is the ‘secret best friend’ of ecocriticism, despite how some versions of ecocriticism want to rough up deconstruction, and explains that, like evolution, deconstruction r…
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Term Anthropocene
Not a day goes by in the 2010s without some humanities scholars becoming quite exercised about the term Anthropocene . In case we need reminding, Anthropocene names the geological period starting in the later eighteenth century when, after the invention of the steam engine, humans began to deposit layers of carbon in Earth’s crust. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term has been current since 2000. 1 In 1945, there occurred “The Great Accelerati…
Victorian Hyperobjects
This Biosphere Which Is Not One: Towards Weird Essentialism
This essay uses the thought of Luce Irigaray as a very powerful way to imagine what ecological beings such as meadows and whales are like. For reasons given yet implicit in Irigaray's work, it is possible to extend what she argues about woman to include any being whatsoever. In particular, it is shown that to exist is to defy the so-called law of noncontradiction. Various paradoxes demonstrate that in order to care for beings that we consider to …
Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence
Timothy Morton explores the foundations of the ecological crisis to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and rediscover playfulness and joy. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think.
Queer Green Sex Toys
Research Article| March 01 2016 Queer Green Sex Toys Timothy Morton Timothy Morton Rice University [email protected] Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and has collaborated with Björk, Haim Steinbach and Olafur Eliasson. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (2015), Hyperobjects: Philo…
Philosophy (21 works) · Art (18 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics (11 works) · Biology (10 works) · Environmental ethics (10 works)