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," is collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here. 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 feminism and "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent.

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 wrote about Bruno Schulz for The Nation

7/29/2019

The life of the Polish Jewish author Bruno Schulz was, by pedestrian measures, a small one. It ended prematurely in 1942, when he was murdered in the street at the age of 50 by a Gestapo officer, and it was almost entirely confined to his provincial hometown of Drohobycz. Schulz drew compulsively, and in his brooding sketches crammed big-headed figures into cramped frames and rooms with low, clutching ceilings. Schulz himself was short and hunched. In photographs, he glowers. “He was small, strange, chimerical, focused, intense, almost feverish,” a friend, the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, recalled in a diary entry. His fiction, too, was small and strange. Schulz’s surviving output consists of just two collections of short fiction, some letters, a few essays, and a handful of stray stories. His longest work spans about 150 pages. Read more here or in print.

I contributed to the TLS Iris Murdoch symposium

7/11/2019

...on the centennial of her birth.

"When I first read Iris Murdoch, I was feeling disastrously American at the University of Cambridge. Murdoch’s fiction was proof that English intellectuals did have turbulent emotional lives, however unruffled they appeared at formal halls. Murdoch not only salvaged my year abroad: she also helped me to perceive a connection between the moral and the aesthetic that I had yet to discern. The quality of any piece of writing (fictional or otherwise) is in large part question of its sensitivity to other people’s experience of the world. Thus any would-be writer has aesthetic – in addition to ethical – reason to practise empathy." Read the rest (and other TLS contributors' contributions) here.

I wrote about Gregor von Rezzori's 900 page novel for Bookforum

5/30/2019

What was it like in the lost lands of Rezzori’s youth? Mostly, it seems, it was light there. In Rezzori’s loosely autobiographical novel An Ermine in Czernopol (1958), his narrator eulogizes a childhood in which “everything seemed sharper, brighter, and more intense.” In The Snows of Yesteryear, Rezzori announces that “with the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a light was extinguished that until then had bathed the days in a golden sheen.” And in Abel and Cain, a nearly nine-hundred-page colossus out from New York Review Books this spring, another wistful Pan-European reports that his first memories are full of “light falling obliquely through a large window, slanting across a bright room.”
Even the spring of 1938, when Hitler marched into Vienna, was eerily luminous. The early days of Nazism were blessed with “Hitler weather,” “an icy cold blue sky and a Sunday glow.” Is the harsh glint of “Hitler weather” part of what Rezzori, in the guise of his narrators, misses? He never says as much. But after all his talk of glitter and glow, I can’t help but wonder. Read more here.

I contributed to LitHub's symposium on Christian Lorentzen's "Like This or Die"

5/6/2019

The novel is a durable form, no matter how many time its death has been declared,” writes Lorentzen. The novel is not dead—not even moribund—because novels have only ever seriously interested a small but fiercely interested (and fiercely quarrelsome) group of marginal weirdos. Their survival does not depend on their capacity to command a mass audience but rather on their capacity to captivate cachectic devotees. Criticism, too, is a durable form. Its best practitioners, perverse lovers of hating, have always constituted an embittered, embattled minority. And aren’t we at least lucky to live at a time when there’s so much to loathe? Read the whole thing (and my co-contributers' contributions) here.

I wrote about Nancy K. Miller's memoir for The TLS

3/21/2019

The poststructural thinkers who pronounced the author dead did not think to mourn. They regarded the author’s demise as a liberating development – one that freed the reader from the strict constraints of biographical interpretation. The feminist critic Nancy K. Miller claimed, however, that reports of the author’s death had been greatly exaggerated. In her seminal essay “The Text’s Heroine” (1982), she argued that it is necessary to “continue to work for the woman who has been writing”: “not to do so will reauthorize our oblivion”. If the “dead” author is irrelevant to the work, then by extension so is their gender. Miller was one of the first to point out that this approach too easily suggests that identity – and whatever material constraints attend it – has no bearing on opportunity or output. Read more here.

I did a Secrets of the Book Critics interview with Lit Hub

2/27/2019

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.