The Singer of Tales in Performance
John Miles Foley
Indiana University Press
Building on his work in "Traditional Oral Epic and Immanent Art", John Foley dissolves the perceived barrier between "oral" and "written," creating a composite theory from oral-formulaic theory and the ethnography of speaking and ethnopoetics. He argues that a work's "word-power" derives from its real performance and its implied traditional context. Foley applies the concept of word-power to a wide range of genres-including Serbian charms, the Homeric Hymns, and the Anglo-Saxon hagiography Andreas, uncovering the expressive roots of oral-derived traditional works to recover both the performance event and the traditional context.