Becca Rothfeld
  • About
  • Selected Writing
    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
    • Juvenilia
  • CV
  • Contact
  • GRAD SCHOOL APP ADVICE
  • 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 am (very soon to be) the non-fiction book critic at the Washington Post. In the meantime, I'm an essayist and literary critic, a contributing editor at The Point and The Boston Review, and a PhD candidate (albeit one on hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on an essay collection about maximalism, tentatively titled All Things Are Too Small, to be published by Metropolitan Books in the US and Virago in the UK. To keep up with my writing/rantings, subscribe to my substack here.

I hold a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A., summa cum laude with high honors, from Dartmouth College, where I studied philosophy & German (and cultivated an enduring distaste for fraternities). These days I live in Cambridge, MA, with this person, whom I love. 

As a writer:
I contribute essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more. I am the winner of the first annual Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism (see more here).
I'm also 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. When I write criticism, I write mostly about "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent, but I also review contemporary fiction sometimes. A few authors I especially love are Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Henry James, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist, Marie de France, Simone Weil, Antal Szerb, and Norman Rush. 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. My wonderful agent is Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary. (You can stalk her and her agency here.)

As a philosopher:
I am primarily interested in aesthetics (especially aesthetic value and its relationship to other types of value), the philosophy of love and sex, and the history of German philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger, although I have increasingly consuming secondary interests in political philosophy. In my second-year paper, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," forthcoming in the British Journal of Aesthetics, I defend aestheticism, the view that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. (A draft is available upon request.) If I ever get around to writing it, my dissertation will be about some combination of the following: what it is to be a beautiful person, why evolutionary psychologists are wrong about human beauty, the ethics of exclusionary romantic/sexual/aesthetic preferences, and what role the state should play in ameliorating inequitable distributions of intimate "goods."

​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, and I urge all prospective grad students to consult resources online, as well as supervisors who have served on admissions committees, rather than me! 

Before the pandemic, I followed Hegel in regarding nature as geistlos, but now, like any good Heideggerian, I am a big fan of hiking. Here I am in the Berkshires, which I love
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I did a podcast

12/27/2019

3 Comments

 
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
3 Comments
Edward
12/28/2019 05:36:40 am

Your discussion of Weil’s belief that on earth one can’t take any action toward beauty reminded me (please excuse the egotism) of a qualm I’ve sometimes felt about the idea of devoting my life to mathematics (assuming that some form of Platonism obtains): Although mathematics has indeed, as Russell famously put it, “supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere,” even the great masters of it who wander deep into its flowered wood are in a sense walking through something sealed off from their touch and smell. Heaven would be where mathematical beauty is somehow not just merely observed but simultaneously observed and made—smelled and touched for the first time. Perhaps this is why some people are strongly drawn toward the act of writing fiction: It can combine the glories of observation that one finds in books, with participation in the creation of the structure of that observation. Anyway, these are likely trivial thoughts, but they seem relevant. Incidentally, your terror is misplaced; you did a fine job speaking. I hope you do more podcasts!

Reply
Becca rothfeld
12/28/2019 06:43:32 am

No, not trivial at all! Beautifully articulated, very interesting, and, I suspect at first glance, probably in large part true! Thank you!

Reply
Edward
12/30/2019 07:13:34 am

Kind words. Thanks!

Oh, and I also want to say, at the risk of sounding like a crazed Levy character confessing to a stranger at a party, that I smiled out of fellow feeling when you mentioned your fear of pooping in front of that man you were seeing.

Years ago, because of passport restrictions, my Russian ex-wife (at the time my girlfriend) and I had to meet for the very first time in Zagreb, Croatia, in winter. (We’d met online.) A young American, I had never been on an airplane: I was essentially a naïve idiot in all things. Upon my arrival, an obese, fur-coated taxi driver bilked me out of $75 for a seven-minute ride (the currency conversion was a mystery to me still), at one moment pointing at a building and kindly telling me, “The American embassy—it’s there, if you need help! Ha ha!” He accidentally took me to the wrong address, so an hour later, after another taxi ride, I finally arrived at my hotel. I’d made it there before my girlfriend. I went to my room and as soon as I opened the door, I heard behind me, from the bottom of the stairwell, a young female voice call up loudly, “Edward? . . . Edddward?” And my heart was beating like mad and I said, “Yes?!” And I ran down to her, hugging her up into the air, almost falling backwards onto the stairs. Once in our room, we awkwardly circled it together still in our coats, pretending to be interested in the T.V., the curtains, the twin bed, the dreary window view of a nearby building’s flat-gray rooftop, but always watching each other peripherally, like two unrelated chimps just released into a zoo pen from opposite sides. At last we mustered up the courage to slowly turn to face one another, and we locked eyes. Suddenly we stopped babbling. A few seconds of slow silence. Then we kissed.

Well, let me just say that Zagreb food, especially the lukewarm cheese Danish at small, bustling street-side shops, is very cheap; and our hotel room was a large closet; and I had your intense fear of being a disgusting dirty beast in front of my partner—at least for as long as gaseous, gut-rumbling biology permitted: about a week. O, the pain!

To think of how much one secretly farts on beautiful experiences by being anxious! . . . Shameful!

Okay, enough egotistical chattering. Sorry!

Take care, E.




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