It is an honor to have the chance to discuss publicly Elaine Freedgood's work and its effects—“incalculably diffusive,” as they say in Middlemarch—in the world. George Eliot is an idealist and Elaine a materialist, which means that tracing Elaine's work and its work in the world, unlike that of the more pious and boring Dorothea Brooke, is possible. You can touch it. To do this labor of tracing will require thinking about Elaine's commitment to the category of the material, against the ideal and the idealized; it will also require thinking about the place that the conceptual or theoretical, but also the affective and communal, occupy for her, in relation to what Raymond Williams used to call concrete social processes. If Dorothea has a “finely tuned spirit,” with “many fine issues,” Elaine's allegiances push her away from finery, away too from “spirit.” Away, as she says in her reading of this very passage, from “mysterious, quietist, and … deeply sentimental form[s]” of consolation and toward “larger historical processes that cannot be domesticated.”

中文翻译：

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任何物质方式

很荣幸有机会公开讨论 Elaine Freedgood 的作品及其影响——正如他们在米德尔马奇-在世界上。George Eliot 是理想主义者，Elaine 是唯物主义者，这意味着追溯 Elaine 的工作和它的与更加虔诚和无聊的多萝西娅布鲁克不同，在世界上工作是可能的。你可以触摸它。进行这种追踪工作需要考虑伊莱恩对材料类别的承诺，反对理想和理想化；它还需要考虑概念或理论，以及情感和公共，相对于雷蒙德威廉姆斯过去称之为具体社会过程的东西，为她所占据的位置。如果说多萝西娅有一种“精巧的精神”，有“许多美好的问题”，那么伊莱恩的忠诚使她远离了华丽，也远离了“精神”。正如她在阅读这篇文章时所说，远离“神秘的、安静的、……深刻的情感形式”的安慰，转向“无法驯化的更大的历史进程”。