Becca Rothfeld
  • About
  • Selected Writing
    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
    • Juvenilia
  • CV
  • Contact
  • About
  • Selected Writing
    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
    • Juvenilia
  • CV
  • Contact
Picture
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," 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. 

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 Lolita for The Point

9/17/2019

0 Comments

 
I have read Lolita differently at different times in my life. At first I read it flat-footedly, just as an object of dazzling beauty. I must have found it on my parents’ shelves, where I often foraged for reading on nights when I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t grasp much of what I grappled with in my fits of insomnia, both because everything passed through the gauze of my stale exhaustion and because most of my parents’ books described a world I could not yet imagine. I had just survived the seventh grade, and for months the greatest trial in my life had been the weekly bar and bat mitzvahs I dreaded but could not, on pain of rudeness, avoid. Week after week, I shifted in shoes that pinched my feet. On the sole disastrous occasion when I consented to a slow dance, my partner told me I rocked back and forth too violently, as in fact I had. It had yet to occur to me that I could be an object of sexual interest to anyone, probably because I, by dint of my glow-in-the-dark retainer and the attendant spittle I spewed whenever I spoke with enthusiasm, was emphatically not an object of sexual interest to anyone at the time....Read more here or in print.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly