Mod B: Critical Study Essay- speeches (Lessing + Atwood)
Doris Lessing’s On Not Winning the Nobel Prize (2007) and Margaret Atwood’s Spotty-Handed Villainesses (1994) are both worthy speeches because they evoke a personal response in their intended audience and offer solutions to complex global issues. These issues are complex because they do not have a clear answer and hence, remains a controversial topic and reverberates across time. Therefore, the solutions offered by these speeches also resonates beyond the contextual audience and holds value for the modern responder. Lessing spoke to the general public, through the Nobel lectures, to discuss the issue of world poverty. She focused her speech on the relationship between education and poverty and as such, conveyed education as the means to escape poverty. Atwood’s oration was delivered to a well-read audience and draws attention to gender inequality by examining the unfair representation of women in literature.
The worth of Lessing’s speech lies in her ability to evoke a response to world poverty, from her audience, through her emotionally gripping use of rhetoric. The euphemistic allusion to the Nobel prizes in “I don’t think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes” is especially confronting for her immediate audience, the Nobel Prize Committee, as it brings immediacy to the fact that, it is near impossible to overcome poverty without the tools of education. This adds realism to the issue of world poverty and thus, compels the audience to respond. In the African mother’s narrative, Lessing appeals to pathos by depicting her children’s throats as “full of dust”. This emotionally symbolises the parched, stifled voices that helplessly await the nourishment of education and hence, creates an emotional response. Through emotionally charged rhetoric, Lessing challenges the conventional belief that the impoverished require monetary aid and evokes a common response to increase access to education. Hence, until world poverty no longer exists, Lessing’s call for
The worth of Lessing’s speech lies in her ability to evoke a response to world poverty, from her audience, through her emotionally gripping use of rhetoric. The euphemistic allusion to the Nobel prizes in “I don’t think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes” is especially confronting for her immediate audience, the Nobel Prize Committee, as it brings immediacy to the fact that, it is near impossible to overcome poverty without the tools of education. This adds realism to the issue of world poverty and thus, compels the audience to respond. In the African mother’s narrative, Lessing appeals to pathos by depicting her children’s throats as “full of dust”. This emotionally symbolises the parched, stifled voices that helplessly await the nourishment of education and hence, creates an emotional response. Through emotionally charged rhetoric, Lessing challenges the conventional belief that the impoverished require monetary aid and evokes a common response to increase access to education. Hence, until world poverty no longer exists, Lessing’s call for