Becca Rothfeld - About

Hi, I'm Becca. I'm an essayist, a literary critic, and a third-going-on-fourth 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," was subsequently collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here.) In 2018, my essay "Rhapsody in Blue" was included on the Notable Essays and Literary Non-Fiction list published in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology. You can read my interview with the National Book Critics Circle here and my interview with Lit Hub for their Secrets of the Book Critics series here. I write mostly about "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent, but I also review contemporary fiction sometimes.

At Harvard, I have three main areas of interest: aesthetics (especially aesthetic value and its relationship to other types of value), the philosophy of love and sex, and Martin Heidegger. In my second-year paper, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," I argue that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. (A draft is available upon request.) My dissertation will be about the ethics of exclusionary romantic/sexual/aesthetic preferences and what role the state should play in ameliorating inequitable distributions of intimate goods. My amazing committee members are Selim Berker, Susanna Siegel, Gina Schouten, and Lucas Stanczyk.

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. A few authors I especially love are Italo Svevo, Saul Bellow, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Julio Cortazar, Helen DeWitt, Marie de France, Simone Weil, Antal Szerb, Norman Rush, and Javier Marias.

I did two podcasts, one on Lolita and one on Marie Kondo and negative reviews

2/15/2020

Although speaking is not my preferred medium, and although I cannot promise I don't sound like an idiot because I am too appalled by the sound of my own voice to listen to these, I had a lot of fun recording them! They're with two very smart women, both of whom I like a lot and both of whom are merit further internet-stalking (in an admiring but non-creepy way, of course):

On Lolita with Jennifer Frey on her podcast, Sacred and Profane Love: https://thevirtueblog.com/2020/01/17/episode-19-love-and-lust-in-lolita/

On Marie Kondo and negative book reviewing with B.D. McClay on the inaugural episode of her podcast, Stet:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stet/id1498659735#episodeGuid=9d382c82-e486-4947-941c-bf2f260504e8

I wrote about Sally Rooney for The Point

1/31/2020

The Irish novelist Sally Rooney is a normal person. Or so she is always insisting, often with a trace of defensive desperation. Never mind that she published her debut novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), at the tender age of 26, or that her second novel, Normal People (2018), was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Never mind that she is the youngest-ever recipient of the Costa Book Prize. No, Rooney protests, her many accolades and immense popularity notwithstanding, she is just like everyone else. Here she is in Vanity Fair: “I do think it’s very possible I’ll look back on this period of my life when my books were being talked about on Twitter and think, ‘Wow, what a crazy thing to happen to a just totally average person.’” And in O, The Oprah Magazine: “I feel pretty much like everyone else.” And in the Belfast-based literary journal the Tangerine: “Everyone has a life. I haven’t had a particularly interesting one.”

Of course, genuinely normal people do not have the chance to advertise their normalcy in Vanity Fair or Oprah’s magazine. Would Rooney still be so eager to downplay her achievements if there were any risk that she would actually succeed in deflecting attention? I have to say, I hope not. Read more here.

I wrote about James Wood for Bookforum

1/27/2020

James Wood, haters claim, is a hater. The New Yorker’s most influential and polarizing critic hates gaudy postmodernists like Paul Auster and cute sentimentalists like Nicole Krauss. He can’t stand the Cambridge fixture George Steiner, whom he pillories as “a statue that wishes to be a monument,” and he dismisses Donna Tartt as “children’s literature.” Most famously, he loathes fidgety, frantic novels by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Zadie Smith, works of so-called “hysterical realism” that can’t shut up and sit still. In 2004, the editors of n+1 denounced him as a “designated hater.”
In fact Wood’s talent for appreciation far outstrips his gift for denigration. Of the twenty-eight essays collected in Serious Noticing, an anthology of pieces Wood has published over the past twenty years, only two are negative. And even when he is hating, Wood remains eager to discover something to admire. In “Hysterical Realism,” published in 2000, he emphasizes that Zadie Smith “seems capable of almost anything”; in “Paul Auster’s Shallowness,” from 2009, he prefaces his assault by insisting that Auster’s novel Invisible “has charm and vitality in places.”
Read more here.

I wrote about Magda Szabo's Abigail for the NYT Book Review

1/17/2020

Magda Szabo’s novel “Abigail” begins with an ending. When we first encounter 14-year-old Gina Vitay, “the change that came about in her life robbed her of so much it was as if a bomb had destroyed her home.” The change in question — the sudden dismissal of Gina’s beloved governess — is just one of many upheavals soon to launch a cosseted teenager into an abrupt adulthood. Read more here!

I wrote about Vasily Grossman for Jewish Currents

1/13/2020

THE RUSSIAN JEWISH NOVELIST VASILY GROSSMAN grasped an important corollary to the now tired truism that the personal is political: he knew, that is, that a morally defensible politics must be personal. At the beginning of Life and Fate, his 1960 opus, he observes that the “very uniformity” of the barracks in a Nazi concentration camp serves to dehumanize. In contrast, “[a]mong a million Russian huts you will never find even two that are exactly the same. Everything that lives is unique. It is unimaginable that two people, or two briar-roses, should be identical.” Read more here.

I did a podcast

12/27/2019

about aesthetic value, beauty, and whether philosophy is aesthetically (or otherwise) valuable--although speaking continues to terrify me, and I think I am a lot worse at it than I am at writing! You can listen here: https://shows.pippa.io/ipse-dixit/episodes/becca-rothfeld-on-consuming-beauty

I wrote about Hrabal for The New Yorker

11/19/2019

Some people speak like writers, but the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal writes like a talker. “I inhale images and then exhale them,” he once told an interviewer. It is fitting that much of Hrabal’s prose was heard before it was read: throughout the late nineteen-forties and fifties, when Hrabal worked as a clerk, an insurance agent, a travelling salesman, a stagehand, a foundry foreman, and a compactor of wastepaper in a recycling plant, he did not publish any of his eccentric stories in mainstream venues. Instead, he read them aloud to a handful of underground literati assembled in pubs. The few works he managed to have printed appeared only in samizdat. Read more here.

I wrote about Simone Weil and impossibly immense appetites for AGNI

11/2/2019

but it's only available in print. Email me for a PDF if you like!

I wrote about the value of philosophy for the Hedgehog Review

11/2/2019

A girl announces that she has decided to major in philosophy. A man replies, “That’s good, because they just opened up that philosophy factory in Green Bay.” This piece of joking dialogue comes from a 1999 episode of That Seventies Show—yet it remains sufficiently au courant to bear recycling in the kind of webcomics my friend sent me when I decided to study philosophy in college. The joke is not only that philosophy majors end up jobless (as, in fact, do majors in every other field). It is also that philosophy lacks the solidity that we might think is the whole measure of reality. It is also that things that can’t be crafted in factories can’t make material contributions to the world. Biologists brew medicines, and engineers make machines. Even economists trade in constructs with tangible power. But as Karl Marx put it in his “Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach” (1845), long before That Seventies Show loomed on even the distant horizon, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world.… The point, however, is to change it.”
Of course, Marx is one of the best advertisements for philosophy’s real-world influence. And it is a myth that all you can do with a philosophy degree is more philosophy: As I am always tripping over myself to assure my students, undergraduate philosophy majors get, on average, the highest LSAT and verbal GRE scores. They even get higher GMAT scores than economists, computer scientists, and chemists! Still, the fact that a philosophy degree enables students to flee to more lucrative pastures is hardly a recommendation for philosophy itself.
Read more here or in print.

I wrote about Ben Lerner's new novel for the Wallstreet Journal

10/17/2019

Ben Lerner, at age 40, has nothing to be embarrassed about: He is a MacArthur Fellow, one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and one of the most acclaimed writers in the English-speaking world. Yet to read his first two novels is to squirm with vicarious embarrassment—not only because his characters are embarrassed by frank displays of sincerity, but also because his characters’ very embarrassment is itself embarrassing. In “Leaving the Atocha Station,” Mr. Lerner’s masterly 2011 debut, his narrator and alter-ego Adam Gordon watches a man weeping in the Prado. “Was he,” Adam wonders, “just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he’d brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art?” Adam, a would-be poet who cannot bring himself to write any poems, is skeptical that profound experiences of art really exist—though he is desperate to believe that they do, which is why he has written such an ambivalent novel about them. Like Adam, we are embarrassed for the man who cries but also horrified by the man who can’t. Read more here.