The Lures and Allures of Amateurism in the Humanities: Reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History through Saikat Majumdar’s The Amateur
The Lures and Allures of Amateurism in the Humanities: Reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History through Saikat Majumdar’s The Amateur

Summary/Abstract: Situated at the crossroads of literary and cultural studies, this paper constructs a reading of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History on the theoretical scaffold of Saikat Majumdar’s 2024 book, The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony, to explore the ambivalence of humanistic amateurism as both a creative driving force in restructuring the architecture of a fossilized establishment and a strongly isolationist form of self-making that can often derail towards moral and intellectual collapse. Dwelling on similar sympathetic views on humanistic amateurism, which range from Susan Sontag’s apology of art for art’s sake in Against Interpretation and Marjorie Garber’s defence of “literature’s uselessness” in The Use and Abuse of Literature to Edward Said’s light-hearted approach in Representations of the Intellectual, this study investigates how Tartt’s narrative subverts the positive potential of amateurism in humanistic studies, foregrounding the dark outcomes of intellectual elitism and voluntary disaffiliation from the academic establishment. While Majumdar defends the rise of the amateur in the humanities as a liberating agent that might emancipate and reform the field, Tartt’s gloomy depiction of the violent consequences of the same condition opens a dialectic discussion about the lures and allures of amateurism. Thus, this study explores the grey zone that forms at the intersection of this dialectic ambivalence, suggesting that the issue of intellectual amateurism remains a paradox, particularly in the digital, post-pandemic academia. Moreover, this study argues that the amateur stance may reflect the current redefinition of the humanities in alignment with contemporary challenges.

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