Livre - The singer of tales in performance

Both living oral traditions and texts with roots in oral tradition share a context in which the speaker performs for an audience, either real or implied. John Foley argues that the methods and strategies of traditional oral expression – of “The singer of tales” – persist into the realm of texts. This study dissolves the perceived barrier between “oral” and “written”, creating a composite theory from oral-formulaic theory and the ethnography of speaking and ethnopoetics. Foley highlights both the idiom of the oral work, which is at once traditional and individual, and the realm of performance, which gives “the tale” its expressive force. Foley examines 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 its traditional context.