Becca Rothfeld - About

Hi, I'm Becca. I'm an essayist, a literary critic, and a third-year PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard.

I write essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review for publications like The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more. I'm a two-time finalist for The National Book Critics Circle's book reviewing prize (2016 and 2018), and in 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. My nominated essay "Ladies in Waiting," about women and waiting, is collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here. You can read my interview with the National Book Critics Circle here. I write mostly about feminism and "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent. A few authors I especially love are Italo Svevo, Saul Bellow, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Julio Cortazar, Helen DeWitt, Marie de France, Simone Weil, William Gass, Antal Szerb, Norman Rush, and Javier Marias.

At Harvard, I think mostly about art, literature, beauty, and the relationship between aesthetic value and other types of value. In my second-year paper, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," I argued that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. (A draft is available upon request; I'm in the process of dramatically revising, and I welcome devastating objections.) I have strong secondary interests in feminism and 20th century continental philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger. I'm currently at work on a paper about whether it is possible to be a constitutivist about aesthetic value and a paper about how we might read Heidegger as an ethicist. I'm still in the process of figuring out what my dissertation will be about, but it may have to do with love, reasons, and sexism and racism in romantic preferences.

Before I began my PhD in the fall of 2016, I earned a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge, where I wrote a dissertation about the metaphysics of sickness. Before that, I served as assistant literary editor of The New Republic. Before that (!), I graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth in 2014 with a degree in philosophy & German (and an enduring distaste for fraternities). These days I live in Somerville MA but I go to New York a lot. I love RuPaul's Drag Race, punishingly long runs, and even the parts of Berlin that have become hopelessly lame.

I wrote about Machado de Assis for The New Republic

2/4/2019

In his 1881 masterpiece, Epitaph of a Small Winner, the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis instructs his readers to memorize the phrase “the voluptuousness of misery.” “Study it from time to time, and, if you do not succeed in understanding it, you may conclude that you have missed one of the most subtle emotions of which man is capable,” he warns. You will also have missed the key to Machado’s sly stories, which make for marvelous miseries. Read more here.

I wrote about how immoral men are aesthetically objectionable for The Baffler

1/28/2019

The truth is that college-aged men who date women in high school, to say nothing of middle-aged men who date women in their early twenties, to say nothing of men who makes passes at the captive audience of their employees, are losers. They live in predictable rooms and write predictable books. They even smoke predictable cigarettes. Men like that don’t even have the minor merit of originality. Read more here.

I reviewed a graphic novel about Hannah Arendt for the TLS

1/2/2019

Hannah Arendt was obsessed with the dangers of thoughtlessness. Nine years after her controversial report on the Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961 appeared in the New Yorker, she was still fascinated by the man’s conspicuous glibness – and still convinced that lazy habits of speech and mind gave rise to evil-doing. As she remarked in her lecture “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1970), “the only specific characteristic one could detect” in Eichmann was “a curious, quite authentic inability to think”. Her conclusion was that critical engagement is not just intellectually but also ethically imperative.
How would Arendt feel, then, about the facile lionization she faces in The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, a graphic novel-cum- biography by the cartoonist Ken Krimstein? Read more here or in print.

I wrote about Uwe Johnson's opus for the Dec/Jan issue of Bookforum

11/29/2018

"The titles of certain books are like names of cities in which we used to live for a time,” Ortega y Gasset once wrote. “They at once bring back a climate, a peculiar smell of streets, a general type of people and a specific rhythm of life.” Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries is a book to live in: two volumes and more than 1,700 pages of roomy universe, robustly imagined and richly populated... More here or in print.

I wrote about Helen DeWitt for The Nation

10/11/2018

If anyone is entitled to misgivings about the pernicious world of publishing, it’s Helen DeWitt, the long-suffering veteran of a by-now-well-known bevy of artistic successes and commercial failures. The Last Samurai, an exuberantly experimental novel about a child prodigy and his brilliant but depressive mother, made a triumphant debut at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999, but its publication was fraught. DeWitt fought to retain her idiosyncratic typesetting, faced off with a belligerent copy editor, and saw few profits in the wake of financial disputes with her publisher. Worse still, the imprint responsible for The Last Samurai folded in 2005. Though the book commanded a dedicated cult following, it went out of print until New Directions reissued it 11 years later. Read more here or in print.

I wrote about Michel Pastoureau's history of the color blue for the September issue of Art in America...

9/17/2018

but it's print only, for now. (The tantalizing Table of Contents is available here.)

I wrote about John Kaag's new book about Nietzsche for The Atlantic

9/16/2018

The dubious notion that philosophy is a guide to calmer living is as old as the field itself. Saint Augustine described philosophy as a “harbor” for troubled souls in a fourth-century monograph on the happy life, and the sixth-century Roman senator Boethius titled the treatise he wrote while awaiting execution “The Consolation of Philosophy.” More recently, in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that the aim of philosophy is not to seek the truth but rather to provide relief—“to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Wittgenstein didn’t embrace “a single philosophical method.” Instead he concluded, “There are indeed methods, different therapies” to quiet the buzz of our puzzlement. Read more here.

September 04th, 2018

9/4/2018

I wrote about the many ways in which positivity is oppressive for Issue 41 of the Baffler

9/4/2018

"WE ARE NOT SHOCKED BY NAKED WOMEN. Skinny women. Women forced to field abuses in the bedroom or advances in the workplace, women who have undergone operations to whittle their waists into fine points. But an unhappy woman appalls us, especially if she does not collude in regarding herself as deficient. All happy women are alike, but each unhappy woman jolts us in her own defiant way. Each woman sulking in the back of the photograph, ignoring injunctions to smile. Each woman insisting that she isn’t angry, or at least, she wasn’t angry before she was asked if she was angry, which made her angry, and with reason. But an unhappy woman, consensus has it, is unreasonable or unwell." Read more here or in print.

I wrote about two Klimt and Schiele shows for Art in America

8/22/2018

"The collapse of a culture is felt before it is formalized. The earliest traces of fragmentation appear as fault lines, shifts in facades and fashions, cracks in the smooth surface of an established style. In The Sleepwalkers (1931–32), a roiling trilogy about the decline of Belle Epoque Europe, the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch writes, “Behind all my repugnance and weariness there is a very positive conviction, the conviction that nothing is of more importance to any epoch than its style.”" Read more here.