Becca Rothfeld

Hi, I'm Becca. I write essays and book reviews for the TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, etc, and I'm a second-going-on-third-year PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. In 2017, I was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle's book reviewing prize and a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. My essay "Ladies in Waiting," about women and waiting, is collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here. In obsolete news, I was briefly assistant literary editor of The New Republic, and I have a masters in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge. I graduated from Dartmouth in 2014 with a degree in philosophy & German (and an enduring distaste for fraternities). I live in Somerville MA but I go to New York a lot.

I remain incurably interested in too many things.

In general, I'm interested in narrative, Berlin, mysticism, medieval literature (esp. Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch of Brabant), noir film and fiction, RuPaul's Drag Race and the history of drag, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Berlin, desire/pleasure/pain, what it means to be a "woman," and Mallomars. As a critic, I write mostly about feminism and "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent; I'm especially interested in massive, fin-de-siecle German language novels about the dissolution of the German and Austrian empires. A few authors I especially love are Italo Svevo, Hermann Broch, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Julio Cortazar, Helen DeWitt, Marie de France, Simone Weil, William Gass, Antal Szerb, Norman Rush, and Javier Marias.

Academically, I have two main areas of interest and one area of secondary interest. Centrally, I'm interested in aesthetics/philosophy of literature and 20th century continental German philosophy, specifically Heidegger. I'm perhaps most interested in what beauty is and how it interacts with other sorts of value. Is beauty pleasant, or is it lacerating? Are we beholden to beauty, or is beauty vulnerable to its audience? Is beauty ever a source of moral value (or vice versa)? Is it ever a source of epistemic value (or vice versa)? Do we have moral obligations to sources of beauty? Epistemic obligations? And so on. I'm also interested in disanalogies and analogies between literature and other sorts of art. Is language a material like other materials? Etc. I also have secondary interests in metaphysics, specifically grounding and explanation: is grounding transitive? Is grounding a form of necessitation? How are weird things like negative existentials and accidental generalizations grounded? My second-year paper integrates these interests; in it, I argue that aesthetic value is sometimes a ground of moral value. (A draft is available upon request.) My dissertation will have something to do with Heidegger and literature.

Because I've deleted all social media in the interest of asceticism (and aestheticism, by pun and extension), I will maintain an updated and exhaustive list of writings/news items/ personal curiosities as they're released below. For a curated selection, see the aptly named "selected writing" tab above. Viel Spaß!

I still

5/18/2018

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do not know how to delete my accidental posts so uh enjoy this fab Gerard Manley Hopkins on depression/mortality:
"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep."

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I wrote (a little bit) about Leonard Michaels for the TLS

3/28/2018

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"The first thing I learned in academia is that scholarship has its limits. The most important insights defy our cerebral ministrations, squirming out of our grasp like wriggly fish. What draws us to the academy – a hunger for human understanding – is precisely what we cannot achieve there. Such is the predicament of Raphael Nachman, the final creation of the essayist, novelist and short-story writer Leonard Michaels (1933–2003)..." Read more here or in print.

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I wrote about J.G. Ballard for The New Republic

3/28/2018

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"One of the great secrets of modern life is that we don’t actually want what we want. Instead, we want to go on wanting, luxuriating in our deprivation. The British novelist J.G. Ballard, a lifelong foe of gratified desire, predicted our predicament with eerie prescience. In two essential novels reissued by Picador, the exquisitely grotesque Crash (1973) and the eerily civilized Super-Cannes (2000), Ballard warns against the lures of easy satisfaction..." Read more here.

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I wrote about Feeling Jewish for the Jewish studies issue of the TLS

3/1/2018

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One of the privileges that Jews have enjoyed throughout their troubled history is the right to insist on their Jewishness without having any clear idea of what it is. Lenny Bruce highlighted this phenomenon in his famous monologue about how to distinguish the Jewish and the goyish. Read more here or in print.

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I wrote about Christa Wolf for The Nation

2/22/2018

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There are many mechanisms of expression more private than a diary. Thinking is invisible, and talking is impermanent. A diary, however, has public aspirations: All writing is to some degree expectant of an audience. The preface to One Day a Year, the meticulous yearly record that the East German writer Christa Wolf maintained from 1960 until 2011, concedes this point. At first, Wolf claims that her notes represent “pure, authentic” life with “no artistic intentions.” But only a few lines later, she admits that “the need to be known, including one’s problematic characteristics, one’s mistakes and flaws, is the basis of all literature and is also one of the motives behind this book.” We amass days, Wolf suggests, in the secret hope that someone else will witness and redeem them. The price we pay for our exhibitionism is a life conducted under observation. Read more here or in print.

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I wrote about Berlin Alexanderplatz for Bookforum

1/31/2018

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Some things can exist only on the verge of nonexistence. Like the novel, moribund since its inception—and like God, abidingly vulnerable to heresy and debunking—Berlin has always teetered toward death. It had died and died again by the time I moved there in 2012, when everyone said it was over....read more here or in print.

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I wrote about BDSM and the paradox of painful pleasure for The Point*

12/30/2017

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"...I am still trying to reconcile pain with pleasure, but the negotiation remains impossible. The most popular academic definition of pain, from the International Association for the Study of Pain, specifies that it’s disagreeable: “Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that is associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in such terms” (emphasis mine). In other words, physical damage doesn’t qualify as painful unless we come to dislike it: “Experiences which resemble pain but are not unpleasant, e.g. pricking, should not be called pain.” So it would seem that masochism—defined by Freud as “pleasure in pain”—is hopelessly paradoxical. As soon as a feeling shades into pleasure, it quits the domain of the painful; but a pleasure too painful negates itself." Read more here (or preferably, in print, here). (You should subscribe to The Point, which is consistently interesting and insightful.)

*A brief note about this text, which it's rather frightening to publish: I follow William Gass in thinking that, in general, we should work hard to develop a more nuanced sexual vocabulary. Sex is a hugely important part of human life that we rarely discuss without falling prey to squeamishness, and our descriptive resources in this domain remain woefully impoverished. Moreover and maybe more importantly, I think it's hugely unfortunate that almost all the widely visible discussions of female sexuality in contemporary culture are either themselves objectifications of women or wrenching accounts of female victimization and disempowerment at the hands of terrible men. Women can and should enjoy sex, and the denial of this manifest fact is at the root of so much suffering. I think it's hugely important at this cultural moment--and in general!--for women to try to celebrate their desires. All of which explains both why I'm scared to have published this and why I felt I should. I hope you enjoy it, and, if you're a woman, I'll hope you'll celebrate your sexual agency. Happy almost-2018! May glass ceilings shatter! May consensual sex, both vanilla and non-, be enjoyed!

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I wrote about whether bad men are bad thinkers for the Chronicle Review

12/8/2017

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If literature or scholarship reflected its author’s moral failings, brutality would contravene brilliance: Wrongdoing would amount to its own punishment. We would never have to confront the galling affront of a beautiful thought birthed by a hideous thinker — nor would we persist in demanding decency from the gorgeous and the interesting, to our repeated disappointment. Read more here.

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ahhhh

11/20/2017

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for the 100th time i have posted a blank thing i'm too inept to delete. please help yourself to reading this great essay that i really enjoyed and did not write, by Alexander Nehamas in the Threepenny Review:https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/nehamas_w00.html

I still

I wrote (a little bit) about Leonard Michaels for the TLS

I wrote about J.G. Ballard for The New Republic

I wrote about Feeling Jewish for the Jewish studies issue of the TLS

I wrote about Christa Wolf for The Nation

I wrote about Berlin Alexanderplatz for Bookforum

I wrote about BDSM and the paradox of painful pleasure for The Point*

I wrote about whether bad men are bad thinkers for the Chronicle Review

ahhhh

My essay will appear in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology!

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