The Muse Learns to Write

The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (Eric Havelock, 1986) is the late synthetic statement in which Havelock gathered three decades of argument on the oral-to-literate transition in ancient Greece. The book extends the thesis Havelock first advanced in Preface to Plato: that the invention of the Greek alphabet was not a neutral technology of transcription but the material condition for the philosophical consciousness that followed — for the abstract, visualizable, re-readable text on which Platonic dialectic and Aristotelian analysis depend.

The title carries the thesis. The Muse — the voice of the oral tradition, of Homer and of Hesiod — learned to write when the Greek alphabet made possible the preservation of language apart from the rhythms of live performance. What the Muse lost in the transition was the mimetic-somatic participation of the listener in the performed word; what she gained was the stable text against which sustained critical analysis became possible. For the Seba lineage, Havelock’s argument is the historical-material ground of the transition [[mythos-to-logos|from mythos to logos]] the graph traces across the archaic and classical periods. See eric-a-havelock.

The Muse Learns to Write

Relationships