Eric Alfred Havelock

Daniel R. Fredrick (Eckerd College)
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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

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.]

12025 Eric Alfred Havelock 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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