Eric Alfred Havelock

Daniel R. Fredrick (Eckerd College)

Ed. by Vaios Liapis, Open University of Cyprus
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

Born 3 Jun 1903
Died 4 Apr 1988
Activity 1939-1988

Places

Born in England
Active in Canada; United States; United Kingdom

Activities

Primary

Classicist

Resources

Havelock's Works

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Born in London on June 3, 1903, raised in Scotland, educated at Cambridge, tenured at Harvard and Yale, Eric Alfred Havelock was one of the great contributors to the study of classics, communication, orality and literacy, and composition and rhetoric. Havelock is especially esteemed by scholars in classical rhetoric, as well as orality and literacy, who find

The Muse Learns To Write

and

Preface to Plato

to be landmark texts in the discipline. What follows is a short explication of Havelock's most noteworthy work,

Preface to Plato

In 1963 Havelock asserted an astonishing thesis in his Preface to Plato, that Plato's Republic is not so much about politics as it is about education, that the Republic is really a polemic against poetry, the poetic experience, and the mentally poisonous results

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1440 words

Citation: Fredrick, Daniel R.. "Eric Alfred Havelock". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 February 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12025, accessed 31 October 2024.]