William Faulkner’s Nobel Banquet speech, given at the City Hall in Stockholm in 1950, asserts that writing has become powerless to its reader during the Modern Era. Faulkner supports his claim by using emotional appeal toward his audience and giving them advice on how to become a better writer. As he expresses his beliefs on the art of writing, he uses a variety of rhetorical devices such as parallelism, figurative imagery, and a rhetorical question in order to convey his message that writing should leave an impact on its reader. Given the scholarly tone, Faulkner’s purpose is to teach his audience, the future writer’s of the world, “…Who will some day stand here where I am standing,” about the qualities he believes every good writer should have.
Writers have the power to potentially influence a person’s life dramatically with their words. Faulkner tells his audience that it is a writer’s privilege to “help man endure by lifting…show more content… Faulkner accuses people of losing soul in their writing and “writing not of love but of lust…not of the heart but of the glands.” The repetition of this grammatical construction unites Faulkner’s thoughts by implying that writing from the heart adds strong emotion and creates heart-felt responses whereas writing from the glands is rather insincere. Additionally, when Faulkner states people write out of lust, he is implying that writer’s do there job for the goal of fame and fortune rather than love for it. William Faulkner begins his speech by establishing he writes “least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” Faulkner indicates that he writes purely to contribute to the human race. By him saying this, he creates a humble tone and informs the audience that his speech is intended to pass good advice rather than brag or criticize