 Hello, everyone. I'm Professor Thomas Albrecht of the English Department here at Tulane University. I'm going to talk to you briefly about a recent book publication of mine entitled The Ethical Vision of George Eliot. George Eliot was the pseudonym of an English writer named Marian Evans, one of the most important novelists of the European 19th century. She lived from 1819 to 1880. So most of her adult life took place during what we call the Victorian period. She was revered and celebrated in her time, as well as in our own, for the seven astonishing novels she wrote during the period from 1859 to 1876. The most well-known of her novels is Middle March, A Study in Provincial Life, which appeared in 1872. George Eliot is a highly significant figure in 19th century European literature, in the 19th century European novel, and also in 19th century European women's writing. She's an important figure in the tradition of literary realism and a pivotal figure in the transition from literary realism to literary modernism. Her realism was groundbreaking in terms of its rigorous historicism. Its panoramic social perspectives, its psychological penetration and complexity, its rhetorical and formal sophistication, and its compassionate humanism. Eliot is also an important figure in the rich tradition of European philosophical fiction and in the novel of ideas. My book that I will talk briefly about, The Ethical Vision of George Eliot, is a study of some ideas about ethics that Eliot developed over the course of her career in her writings. My areas as a literary scholar are philosophical approaches to literature and literature and ethics. As you can guess, this means that I think and write about literary works in terms of how they directly or indirectly engage with philosophical and ethical topics. George Eliot takes up explicitly philosophical and ethical questions throughout her novels. And many of the questions and topics that she takes up correlate with the questions and topics that engage us so urgently today in our own time. This is just one reason among many why I'm so drawn to her writings. A key ethical topic Eliot repeatedly takes up is the relationship that we as human beings have or should have to what philosophers call the other. The other means other individual persons, their minds that are separate from our own and also other kinds of persons. Persons who are categorically different from ourselves in terms of their social or economic class, their nationality, their language, gender, religion, race or age. In my book, I show how early in her career especially, Eliot exhorts her readers, her characters and herself to recognize and value a common humanity in other persons, no matter how outwardly and circumstantially different those persons might be from ourselves. This attention to commonality is an urgent ethical imperative in our own time. For example, in the context of our device of presidential election, a context in which so many of us have struggled to see any humanity at all in persons who disagree with us politically. My book also shows how Eliot increasingly over the course of her career comes to posit the recognition of difference or otherness, the otherness of the other from ourselves as an ethical imperative in its own right. And she comes to insist increasingly that we not erase that otherness, the otherness of the other under the rubric of a common humanity. Rather she insists we should recognize the other's otherness from ourselves and we should respect it. For Eliot, respect means not presuming to know the other or to speak for the other. By respecting the other in this way, we not only preserve the other's otherness as an inherent value, but we strike a blow against egoism. The moral fallacy Eliot spends a lifetime combating and diagnosing in us, in her characters, and also in ourselves, in herself. The egoism we strike a blow against is our own, at least potentially. It is our presumption to know and to speak about the other, our tendency narcissistically to see the other as a reflection of some element, some prejudice within ourselves. My book shows how both these moral imperatives, the imperative to recognize a common humanity and the imperative to recognize and respect differences are essential parts of Eliot's overall ethical vision. Over the course of her career, they mutually inform and dialectically develop one another, suggesting that for Eliot, any genuinely ethical relationship to the other requires both the capacity to recognize commonalities and the capacity to respect differences. In her final writings, Eliot concludes that genuine relationships, genuine connections with other persons across various differences are indeed possible, but only on the hard condition of our first recognizing and respecting the differences that separate us. My writing and teaching about literature strive to reveal complex existential, psychological and ethical insights that writers like George Eliot can give us through their works. Eliot herself believes that literature has a unique power to transform us morally by surprising, by jolting us into an unexpected awareness of both human commonalities and differences. I find with my students here at Tulane that this is as true in our own time as it was in Eliot's. Thank you so much for listening.