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
Picture
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 Nancy K. Miller's memoir for The TLS

3/21/2019

1 Comment

 
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.
1 Comment
Vivian
4/7/2019 10:07:38 am

you have such an intense and unique voice on the page; it comes across as never cruel but warm - - warm when the object of dissection warrants warmth yet always clinically direct and honest. as a lit critic you have a great bedside manner, doc. never stop writing! (Or thinking!! good luck on your philo!)

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    February 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    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