The Singer of Tales in Performance

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.