A revolução da escrita na Grécia e suas consequências culturais

by Eric Alfred Havelock

A escrita exerce notável controle sobre o que é comunicado. Ao isolarem e definirem conceitualmente as consoantes, os gregos não estariam propriamente adaptando a escrita silábica fenícia, mas criando um dos sistemas mais perfeitos de comunicação: o alfabeto. Grande parte da obra de Havelock comenta os efeitos dessa invenção na cultura oral grega, e privilegia dois autores em suas análises: Homero e Platão.

Genres: Philosophy, History

370 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1982

About the author

Eric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at both Harvard and Yale. Although he was trained in the turn-of-the-20th-century Oxbridge tradition of classical studies, which saw Greek intellectual history as an unbroken chain of related ideas, Havelock broke radically with his own teachers and proposed an entirely new model for understanding the classical world, based on a sharp division between literature of the 6th and 5th centuries BC on the one hand, and that of the 4th on the other.

Much of Havelock's work was devoted to addressing a single thesis: that all of Western thought is informed by a profound shift in the kinds of ideas available to the human mind at the point that Greek philosophy converted from an oral to a literate form. The idea has been very controversial in classical studies, and has been rejected outright both by many of Havelock's contemporaries and modern classicists. Havelock and his ideas have nonetheless had far-reaching influence, both in classical studies and other academic areas. He and Walter J. Ong (who was himself strongly influenced by Havelock) essentially founded the amorphous field that studies transitions from orality to literacy, and Havelock has been one of the most frequently cited theorists in that field; as an account of communication, his work profoundly affected the media theories of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Havelock's influence has spread beyond the study of the classical world to that of analogous transitions in other times and places. (wiki).

Reviews

[Ana Ferraz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!

[Ellana Thornton-Wheybrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

[DNF: Read what I needed to for university, then stopped]

A truly fascinating book. I'm not overly convinced by some of the conclusions and claims it makes, but I did enjoy reading it.

[Congratulations. Accept · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book ...