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    A Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds"
    A Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds"
    A Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds"
    Ebook42 pages57 minutes

    A Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 22, 2018
    ISBN9781410388636
    A Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds"

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      A Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" - Gale

      17

      Speech Sounds

      Octavia E. Butler

      1983

      Introduction

      Octavia E. Butler is a writer who, producing mostly science fiction over the course of her career, transcended genre boundaries to be recognized as an author of works of high literary quality. Butler made a name for herself in being not only the first but for some time the only female African American science fiction writer. It is true that her fiction does the important service of placing a more diverse cast of characters into the world of speculative literature, and she addresses questions of black and female identity, but above all she makes powerful statements on themes of universal relevance to humankind.

      Speech Sounds is a prime example of such thematically charged fiction. One may imagine the protagonist, Rye, to be African American if one likes, but Butler makes no mention of race. Rye is a woman, but she is not out to set forth a feminist agenda—she is merely trying to survive in a dystopian world where people's ability to communicate with each other has been severely compromised. Aggression and violence are commonplace in this world, and Rye needs her wits as well as her reflexes to make it through the day and to find motivation to make it through the days to come. Speech Sounds was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1983. It won the following year's Hugo Award for best science fiction short story, and it was included in Butler's 1995 collection Bloodchild and Other Stories.

      Author Biography

      Octavia Estelle Butler was born on July 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, to a shoeshine man and his wife, whose four earlier sons were already all deceased. Butler would lament, later in life, that the absence of those siblings left her quite alone in the world. Her father died when she was still a toddler, leaving her mother to serve as a domestic worker to support the two of them. Her maternal grandmother also lived with them. Butler—who was called Junie by her mother and Estelle by everyone else—was raised in a racially mixed community in which life's daily struggles were more of a concern than the color of people's skin; she was thus partly spared from the racism that otherwise remained institutionally encouraged across much of the nation through her teenage years. Yet she recognized racial subjugation in the experiences of her mother, who had been pulled out of elementary school

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