Timothy Bloxam Morton (born 19 June 1968)[2] is a professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University.

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

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.

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.

[10] 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.

[11] 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.

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.

[16] 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.

"[17] 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.

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.

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.

[21] 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.

In The Ecological Thought, Morton employed the term hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium.

[34] Additionally, the existential capacity of hyperobjects to outlast a turn toward less materialistic cultural values, coupled with the threat many such objects pose toward organic matter (what Morton calls a "demonic inversion of the sacred substances of religion"), gives them a potential spiritual quality, in which their treatment by future societies may become indistinguishable from reverential care.