Blog Posts - Becca Rothfeld

Hi, I'm Becca. I'm an essayist, a literary critic, and a third-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. In 2017, I was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle's book reviewing prize and a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. My essay "Ladies in Waiting," about women and waiting, is collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here. You can read my interview with the National Book Critics Circle here. I write mostly about feminism and "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent. A few authors I especially love are Italo Svevo, Hermann Broch, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Julio Cortazar, Helen DeWitt, Marie de France, Simone Weil, William Gass, Antal Szerb, Norman Rush, and Javier Marias.

At Harvard, I think mostly about art, literature, beauty, and the relationship between aesthetic value and other types of value. In my second-year paper, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," I argued that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. (A draft is available upon request; I'm in the process of dramatically revising, and I welcome devastating objections.) I have strong secondary interests in feminism and 20th century continental philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger. I'm currently at work on a paper about whether it is possible to be a constitutivist about aesthetic value and a paper about how we might read Heidegger as an ethicist. I'm still in the process of figuring out what my dissertation will be about, but it may have to do with love, reasons, and sexism and racism in romantic preferences.

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 but I go to New York a lot. I love RuPaul's Drag Race, punishingly long runs, and even the parts of Berlin that have become hopelessly lame.

I wrote about David Sedaris for the TLS

6/21/2018

The lives of memoirists must be eventful if their books are to be any good. This is one of the primary hazards of using oneself as material. Calypso, David Sedaris’s most recent collection of stories-cum-essays-cum-reminiscences, grasps at biographical straws. Sedaris writes discursively about middle age, gay marriage and foxes – and he makes obligatory mention of his dead mother’s alcoholism and his sister’s suicide – but his favourite subject is shopping. In one salvo, he buys a beach house for his family. In another, he and his sisters go to Japan to splurge on impressively hideous designer clothing....Read more here.

I wrote about Joanna Walsh's new novel for the TLS

5/31/2018

Break.up, Joanna Walsh’s not-quite novel, memorializes a not-quite relationship. The narrator, a British woman who is not-quite (but I suspect mostly) Walsh herself, mourns the end of a wispy online flirtation that was never formalized or consummated. She travels to a string of European cities – Paris, Athens, Budapest, Berlin – but the book’s essential setting is the non-place of the internet. “Love seems not to take place in normal time, so why should it take place in normal space? Perhaps cyberspace is its most appropriate venue”, she muses. She and her never-quite-but-now-definitely-ex-lover “were together In Real Life for hardly more days than a working week”...read more here.

I wrote about Vernon Lee for the May issue of Art in America

5/31/2018

"In her monograph On Beauty and Being Just (1999), the critic and philosopher Elaine Scarry questions the popular conceit of “the gaze,” a look so penetrating, so ravenous, that it imperils its object. “It is odd that contemporary accounts of ‘staring’ or ‘gazing’ place exclusive emphasis on the risks suffered by the person being looked at,” Scarry writes, “for the vulnerability of the perceiver seems equal to, or greater than, the vulnerability of the person being perceived.”1 For the critical theorists who warn against the gaze, a person or artwork is helpless before its audience. But as Scarry reminds us, the classical tradition regards viewers as victims of their jolting encounters with beauty: lookers are assailed, and art assaults...read more here.

I still

5/18/2018

do not know how to delete my accidental posts so uh enjoy this fab Gerard Manley Hopkins on depression/mortality:
"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep."

I wrote (a little bit) about Leonard Michaels for the TLS

3/28/2018

"The first thing I learned in academia is that scholarship has its limits. The most important insights defy our cerebral ministrations, squirming out of our grasp like wriggly fish. What draws us to the academy – a hunger for human understanding – is precisely what we cannot achieve there. Such is the predicament of Raphael Nachman, the final creation of the essayist, novelist and short-story writer Leonard Michaels (1933–2003)..." Read more here or in print.

I wrote about J.G. Ballard for The New Republic

3/28/2018

"One of the great secrets of modern life is that we don’t actually want what we want. Instead, we want to go on wanting, luxuriating in our deprivation. The British novelist J.G. Ballard, a lifelong foe of gratified desire, predicted our predicament with eerie prescience. In two essential novels reissued by Picador, the exquisitely grotesque Crash (1973) and the eerily civilized Super-Cannes (2000), Ballard warns against the lures of easy satisfaction..." Read more here.

I wrote about Feeling Jewish for the Jewish studies issue of the TLS

3/1/2018

One of the privileges that Jews have enjoyed throughout their troubled history is the right to insist on their Jewishness without having any clear idea of what it is. Lenny Bruce highlighted this phenomenon in his famous monologue about how to distinguish the Jewish and the goyish. Read more here or in print.

I wrote about Christa Wolf for The Nation

2/22/2018

There are many mechanisms of expression more private than a diary. Thinking is invisible, and talking is impermanent. A diary, however, has public aspirations: All writing is to some degree expectant of an audience. The preface to One Day a Year, the meticulous yearly record that the East German writer Christa Wolf maintained from 1960 until 2011, concedes this point. At first, Wolf claims that her notes represent “pure, authentic” life with “no artistic intentions.” But only a few lines later, she admits that “the need to be known, including one’s problematic characteristics, one’s mistakes and flaws, is the basis of all literature and is also one of the motives behind this book.” We amass days, Wolf suggests, in the secret hope that someone else will witness and redeem them. The price we pay for our exhibitionism is a life conducted under observation. Read more here or in print.

I wrote about Berlin Alexanderplatz for Bookforum

1/31/2018

Some things can exist only on the verge of nonexistence. Like the novel, moribund since its inception—and like God, abidingly vulnerable to heresy and debunking—Berlin has always teetered toward death. It had died and died again by the time I moved there in 2012, when everyone said it was over....read more here or in print.

I wrote about BDSM and the paradox of painful pleasure for The Point*

12/30/2017

"...I am still trying to reconcile pain with pleasure, but the negotiation remains impossible. The most popular academic definition of pain, from the International Association for the Study of Pain, specifies that it’s disagreeable: “Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that is associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in such terms” (emphasis mine). In other words, physical damage doesn’t qualify as painful unless we come to dislike it: “Experiences which resemble pain but are not unpleasant, e.g. pricking, should not be called pain.” So it would seem that masochism—defined by Freud as “pleasure in pain”—is hopelessly paradoxical. As soon as a feeling shades into pleasure, it quits the domain of the painful; but a pleasure too painful negates itself." Read more here (or preferably, in print, here). (You should subscribe to The Point, which is consistently interesting and insightful.)

*A brief note about this text, which it's rather frightening to publish: I follow William Gass in thinking that, in general, we should work hard to develop a more nuanced sexual vocabulary. Sex is a hugely important part of human life that we rarely discuss without falling prey to squeamishness, and our descriptive resources in this domain remain woefully impoverished. Moreover and maybe more importantly, I think it's hugely unfortunate that almost all the widely visible discussions of female sexuality in contemporary culture are either themselves objectifications of women or wrenching accounts of female victimization and disempowerment at the hands of terrible men. Women can and should enjoy sex, and the denial of this manifest fact is at the root of so much suffering. I think it's hugely important at this cultural moment--and in general!--for women to try to celebrate their desires. All of which explains both why I'm scared to have published this and why I felt I should. I hope you enjoy it, and, if you're a woman, I'll hope you'll celebrate your sexual agency. Happy almost-2018! May glass ceilings shatter! May consensual sex, both vanilla and non-, be enjoyed!