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. 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," 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 and my interview with Lit Hub for their Secrets of the Book Critics series 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, Saul Bellow, 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 two Klimt and Schiele shows for Art in America

8/22/2018

"The collapse of a culture is felt before it is formalized. The earliest traces of fragmentation appear as fault lines, shifts in facades and fashions, cracks in the smooth surface of an established style. In The Sleepwalkers (1931–32), a roiling trilogy about the decline of Belle Epoque Europe, the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch writes, “Behind all my repugnance and weariness there is a very positive conviction, the conviction that nothing is of more importance to any epoch than its style.”" Read more here.

I was interviewed

8/22/2018

By the National Book Critics Circle. "I regard my criticism as a demand for the perfection that novels, in virtue of their magic, owe us. Simone Weil once wrote in a letter to a friend, “It seems to me certain that this constitutes a serious imperfection in you. And why should there be any imperfection in you? it does not suit you in the least to be imperfect. It is like a wrong note in a beautiful song.” Literature is the only thing I've ever encountered that has the capacity to be perfect, so I expect it to be perfect. So in the happiest instances, my reviews are really just love letters." Read more here.

I wrote about serial killers for The Hedgehog Review

6/27/2018

Begin, for once, with the ending: the arms at an awful angle, the face blue-lipped above a blot of blood. Only later do we glimpse the woman who corresponds to the corpse. She laughs in a flashback. Or she smiles in the photograph pinned to the board where the police map the murders with thumbtacks, charting tangled speculations with lines of yarn. In light of her death, she comes to life. This is the antiordering typical of the serial killer procedural, a narrative scramble that begins with the answer and ages back toward the question. In the television series Hannibal (NBC, 2013–15), a convicted murderer impales a nurse in prison. He snaps at the officers who come to question him, “I was caught red-handed. There’s no mystery as to who done it. I did it!” Still, the officers insist that they have something to ask. Read more here.

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.