The Cultural Logic of Early Environmentalism

Date: Friday, October 26, 1:00 pm

Speaker: Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is professor of literature and the environment at University of California-Davis. His research interests include literature and the environment, theories of ecology, food studies, Romanticism, the eighteenth century, literary theory, and philosophy. His most recent book Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007) argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself, a residue of Romantic thinking in need of re-examination. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. Among Professor Morton’s books are: Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (2005), The Poetics of Spice (2005), a textbook on Frankenstein, an anthology of Romantic food writing, and The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (2006).