Becca Rothfeld
  • About
  • Selected Writing
    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
    • Juvenilia
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  • About
  • Selected Writing
    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
    • Juvenilia
  • CV
  • Contact
  • GRAD SCHOOL APP ADVICE
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Hi, I'm Becca. I'm an essayist and literary critic, a contributing editor at The Point, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. To keep up with my writing/rantings, subscribe to my substack here.

I write essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review for publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, 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. My agent is Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary. (You can stalk her and her agency here.)

At Harvard, I am interested in 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 receive many emails asking for advice about graduate school applications. I have answered some frequently asked questions on this page
.  As I note there, I do not consider myself an expert in how to write a successful graduate school application--I do not know why I was admitted to Harvard!--and I urge all prospective grad students to consult resources online, as well as supervisors who have served on admissions committees, rather than me! 

I wrote about Celan for the Poetry Foundation

1/11/2021

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To read the Jewish-Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan is also to read commentators, commentators on commentators, and so on and on, until finally the clatter of exposition overwhelms the oracular verse. Pierre Joris, the latest translator intrepid enough to tackle the foremost German-language poet of the postwar period, estimates that there are “a hundred plus books” about Celan and “several thousand—six thousand? seven thousand? it is nearly impossible to keep track worldwide—articles and essays that have appeared and keep appearing at a dizzying rate.” Celan is the subject of monographs or papers by thinkers as prominent as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Taylor, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. There are now more than 15 English translations of his most celebrated poem, “Deathfuge.” The academic cottage industry devoted to his work is predictably formidable. Read more here.
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I wrote about Robert Perisic for the TLS

1/7/2021

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“The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman”, wrote Oscar Wilde in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891). In No-Signal Area, a newly translated novel of 2014 by the Croatian author Robert Perišić, there are many dull craftsmen – and a number of unlikely artists.
Perišić’s mordant romp takes place in the town of N, a forlorn outpost on the margins of an unnamed nation in what was once Yugoslavia. It is no accident that the author declines to specify the town’s exact location. Forgotten by policymakers and overlooked by tourists, N might stand for “nowhere”. Its inhabitants are traumatized by memories of the recent ethno-nationalist conflict, and most of them have been out of work since the local turbine factory shut down. Sobotka, once the factory’s engineer, has been estranged from his wife and daughters since they fled to escape the war. Even mobile phone coverage in N is unreliable. Forsaken by the forces of neoliberalism and forgotten by the more fortunate denizens of the new world order, it has become a dreaded no-signal area. Read more here.
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