Blog Posts - Becca Rothfeld

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 Simone Weil and impossibly immense appetites for AGNI

11/2/2019

but it's only available in print. Email me for a PDF if you like!

I wrote about the value of philosophy for the Hedgehog Review

11/2/2019

A girl announces that she has decided to major in philosophy. A man replies, “That’s good, because they just opened up that philosophy factory in Green Bay.” This piece of joking dialogue comes from a 1999 episode of That Seventies Show—yet it remains sufficiently au courant to bear recycling in the kind of webcomics my friend sent me when I decided to study philosophy in college. The joke is not only that philosophy majors end up jobless (as, in fact, do majors in every other field). It is also that philosophy lacks the solidity that we might think is the whole measure of reality. It is also that things that can’t be crafted in factories can’t make material contributions to the world. Biologists brew medicines, and engineers make machines. Even economists trade in constructs with tangible power. But as Karl Marx put it in his “Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach” (1845), long before That Seventies Show loomed on even the distant horizon, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world.… The point, however, is to change it.”
Of course, Marx is one of the best advertisements for philosophy’s real-world influence. And it is a myth that all you can do with a philosophy degree is more philosophy: As I am always tripping over myself to assure my students, undergraduate philosophy majors get, on average, the highest LSAT and verbal GRE scores. They even get higher GMAT scores than economists, computer scientists, and chemists! Still, the fact that a philosophy degree enables students to flee to more lucrative pastures is hardly a recommendation for philosophy itself.
Read more here or in print.

I wrote about Ben Lerner's new novel for the Wallstreet Journal

10/17/2019

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.

September 18th, 2019

9/18/2019

I wrote about Lolita for The Point

9/17/2019

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.

I reviewed Three Women for the TLS

8/24/2019

Though I have often used the phrase “female desire”, I confess that I don’t know exactly what it means. Does any desire that happens to belong to a woman qualify? Or does female desire have a distinctive form and flavour? In Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, a journalistic investigation into the sex lives of three American women, male desire is distinguished by its creaturely crudeness. Taddeo admits in the prologue that her project originally centred on three American men – but she soon discovered that their “stories ended in the stammering pulse of orgasm”. Women, in contrast, wanted with impressive tenacity. In the end, she felt, “it was the female parts of an interlude that … came to stand for the whole of what longing in America looks like”. Read more here.

I wrote about Bruno Schulz for The Nation

7/29/2019

The life of the Polish Jewish author Bruno Schulz was, by pedestrian measures, a small one. It ended prematurely in 1942, when he was murdered in the street at the age of 50 by a Gestapo officer, and it was almost entirely confined to his provincial hometown of Drohobycz. Schulz drew compulsively, and in his brooding sketches crammed big-headed figures into cramped frames and rooms with low, clutching ceilings. Schulz himself was short and hunched. In photographs, he glowers. “He was small, strange, chimerical, focused, intense, almost feverish,” a friend, the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, recalled in a diary entry. His fiction, too, was small and strange. Schulz’s surviving output consists of just two collections of short fiction, some letters, a few essays, and a handful of stray stories. His longest work spans about 150 pages. Read more here or in print.

I contributed to the TLS Iris Murdoch symposium

7/11/2019

...on the centennial of her birth.

"When I first read Iris Murdoch, I was feeling disastrously American at the University of Cambridge. Murdoch’s fiction was proof that English intellectuals did have turbulent emotional lives, however unruffled they appeared at formal halls. Murdoch not only salvaged my year abroad: she also helped me to perceive a connection between the moral and the aesthetic that I had yet to discern. The quality of any piece of writing (fictional or otherwise) is in large part question of its sensitivity to other people’s experience of the world. Thus any would-be writer has aesthetic – in addition to ethical – reason to practise empathy." Read the rest (and other TLS contributors' contributions) here.

I wrote about Gregor von Rezzori's 900 page novel for Bookforum

5/30/2019

What was it like in the lost lands of Rezzori’s youth? Mostly, it seems, it was light there. In Rezzori’s loosely autobiographical novel An Ermine in Czernopol (1958), his narrator eulogizes a childhood in which “everything seemed sharper, brighter, and more intense.” In The Snows of Yesteryear, Rezzori announces that “with the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a light was extinguished that until then had bathed the days in a golden sheen.” And in Abel and Cain, a nearly nine-hundred-page colossus out from New York Review Books this spring, another wistful Pan-European reports that his first memories are full of “light falling obliquely through a large window, slanting across a bright room.”
Even the spring of 1938, when Hitler marched into Vienna, was eerily luminous. The early days of Nazism were blessed with “Hitler weather,” “an icy cold blue sky and a Sunday glow.” Is the harsh glint of “Hitler weather” part of what Rezzori, in the guise of his narrators, misses? He never says as much. But after all his talk of glitter and glow, I can’t help but wonder. Read more here.

I contributed to LitHub's symposium on Christian Lorentzen's "Like This or Die"

5/6/2019

The novel is a durable form, no matter how many time its death has been declared,” writes Lorentzen. The novel is not dead—not even moribund—because novels have only ever seriously interested a small but fiercely interested (and fiercely quarrelsome) group of marginal weirdos. Their survival does not depend on their capacity to command a mass audience but rather on their capacity to captivate cachectic devotees. Criticism, too, is a durable form. Its best practitioners, perverse lovers of hating, have always constituted an embittered, embattled minority. And aren’t we at least lucky to live at a time when there’s so much to loathe? Read the whole thing (and my co-contributers' contributions) here.