Becca Rothfeld
  • About
  • Selected Writing
    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
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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 Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Henry James, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist, Marie de France, Simone Weil, Antal Szerb, and Norman Rush.

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 Ben Lerner's new novel for the Wallstreet Journal

10/17/2019

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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.
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