Kalón and Chaos: The Secret History and its References

Course Description

Summary

"Live forever!" is the chosen mantra of the louche, monied and relentlessly insular group of Classics students at the center of Donna Tartt's now classic literary suspense novel The Secret History. Under the influence of their classics professor Julian Morrow--a "divine" with special status on the campus of Hampden College, a dark mirror-image of our own campus--they undertake experiments in ancient Dionysian religious rites that that culminate in two murders. The novel's animating stroke of genius is to incorporate the same Classical literature the students are enthralled by into the novel by two main methods: adaptation and allusion. We'll devote the term to reading The Secret History closely, pairing it with the major classical works it relies on, including Plato's Symposium and Euripides's The Bacchae, as well as Modern works like The Great Gatsby and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.