William Falkner Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Good Afternoon,

I elected to analyze William Falkner’s Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech for this week forum. At first, I had a hard time identifying the different aspects of the speech until I found audio of it. As part of his introduction, Falkner uses the first sentence in his speech established his credibility and ethos. Then he goes on to state the purpose of his speech very directly by saying that he would like to use this moment to talk to young writers and more specifically the future award winners. Next, he states his thesis, which is that writers are currently too distracted by fears of the cold war to write about problems of the human heart.

Falkner then moves into the body of his speech, which starts with, “He must