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 genresÑincluding Serbian charms, the Homeric Hymns, and the Anglo-Saxon hagiography AndreasÑuncovering the expressive roots of oral-derived traditional works to recover both the performance event and the traditional context.

John Miles Foley is William H. Byler Distinguished Professor of English and Classical Studies at the University of Missouri and director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. He is author of The Theory of Oral Composition, Traditional Oral Epic, and Immanent Art, and founding editor of the journal Oral Tradition.