
Thanh Munoz
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About
Allan Arpajian majored in English and music at the University of Pennsylvania. He later specialized in computer science and worked as an analyst for Unisys Corporation for 24 years. He is the co-author, with his sister Susan Arpajian Jolley, of the book Out of my Great Sorrows, a biography of their aunt, the artist Mary Zakarian.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in Othello
The principal relationship destroyed in Othello is, of course, that of Othello and Desdemona. What is depicted first as a loving marriage deteriorates solely because of Iago's relentless assault... -
Answered a Question in Tears, Idle Tears
Tennyson's poem "Tears, Idle Tears" is a meditation on old age, loss, and death. The speaker's perspective is that of an elderly person, or at least of someone who thinks of his life as nearing its... -
Answered a Question in History
The answer is both yes and no regarding the status of the early United States as an empire. If we define an empire as a state that controls any territory outside the area in which its citizens... -
Answered a Question in The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
A major aspect of Renaissance humanism is its focus on the inherent value of earthly life. This was largely in contrast to the medieval sense of this life as a "vale of woe" and a mere prelude to... -
Answered a Question in Doctor Faustus
Doctor Faustus is not merely a tragedy, but also a philosophical drama to a degree that perhaps even Shakespeare did not achieve (or attempt to) in his tragedies of a few years later. It's not an... -
Answered a Question in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
An element of Romanticism was the drive to recapture the spirit and feel of the remote past. In the neoclassical period (about 1690 to 1750), Dryden and Pope had focused upon emulating the poets of... -
Answered a Question in When I Was Puerto Rican
The opening epigraph of When I was Puerto Rican is a metaphor that describes the immigrant experience of people of all nationalities. In settling in a new country, one's identity is not so much... -
Answered a Question in 1984
In some sense, all fictional protagonists represent human nature because they are the focus of the novels in which they appear, in which the author is trying to convey something essential and... -
Answered a Question in I, Too
Orature is defined as a body of poetry having roots in oral tradition, extending back in time to a period in history possibly before verse was written down. In this poem, it's seems that Hughes is... -
Answered a Question in Break, Break, Break
As is frequently the case in his work, Tennyson gives us the sense of an irresistible power in nature in the opening of this famous poem. If the first stanza is looked at in isolation, the meaning... -
Answered a Question in Preface to Lyrical Ballads
For Wordsworth, the language of poetry should not differ from that of prose except in so far as poetry utilizes metrical forms (and optionally, rhyme). So, poetry is metrical, but should otherwise... -
Answered a Question in The Dragon Can't Dance
Aldrick, in some fundamental way, is not really happy. He lives in a kind of fantasy world in which the seemingly unattainable Sylvia is constantly in his thoughts. His focus upon Carnival and the... -
Answered a Question in Postcolonialism
As with other literary and historical issues, terminology is often used in a flexible way. There is no hard and fast definition of when modernism ended and postmodernism began. Nor is there total... -
Answered a Question in 1984
Though these two men in 1984 are in some sense opposites—Syme is brilliant and Parsons is perhaps the least intelligent person Winston knows—they have in common their unquestioning allegiance to... -
Answered a Question in Romanticism
As with all artistic movements and trends, a combination or intersection of factors, including external events and changes in thought and transformations of long-held systems of belief, contributed... -
Answered a Question in Macbeth
In this passage, Lady Macbeth is chiefly attempting to quiet her husband and to impress upon him that no one has actually witnessed the murder he has committed. Macbeth is terrified that his... -
Answered a Question in Goodbye, Columbus
Goodbye, Columbus is a kind of a prototype within Philip Roth's oeuvre of his depiction of conflict and and ambiguity in a young man's perception of his religious and ethnic background. Neil is a... -
Answered a Question in Civil War Battles and Strategy
Many factors led to Northern victory, but for the purposes of this answer we should focus on the two I believe are the most important. First, as has long been recognized, the Union was far better... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film was a huge hit with audiences upon its first release. It was also criticized in some quarters for those very features that made it so popular. The critic Leslie... -
Answered a Question in Immanuel Kant
Kant's philosophy is both an essential part of the Enlightenment and, perhaps paradoxically, a reaction against elements of that movement. Much of his ethical thinking is an attempt to create an... -
Answered a Question in The Waste Land
As with most modernist works, "The Waste Land" has evoked conflicting reactions from critics and general readers and commentators, in its own time and through to the present. Eliot's cousin, the... -
Answered a Question in My Dungeon Shook
In "My Dungeon Shook," James Baldwin addresses his nephew with a message that recognizes the terrible burden of racial oppression he knows the younger man will have to deal with. In the sense of... -
Answered a Question in Film and Television
The film Titanic (1997) is a dramatization of an iconic and tragic historical event, overlaid with a love story which in itself exemplifies historical transformation and perhaps ironically shows... -
Answered a Question in The Dumb Waiter
The static, claustrophobic setting of The Dumb Waiter creates the background for the absurdist themes of the play. And the briefest description of the plot shows a negation of the conventional... -
Answered a Question in All the King's Men
Perhaps even more than the assassination of Willie Stark, the suicide of Judge Irwin is the key event and the climax of All the King's Men. When Jack Burden's mother screams, "You killed your... -
Answered a Question in Me Talk Pretty One Day
Sedaris writes in an understated but satiric tone while observing the people surrounding him, their conformity to social norms, and their attempts to force those norms upon others. His purpose,... -
Answered a Question in The Awakening
Kate Chopin's story is in many respects a study in opposites. From the start, the reader senses a polarization between Edna and the conventional New Orleans society to which her husband and his... -
Answered a Question in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" takes place at a time when the United States had only recently achieved its independence. Washington Irving's stories often describe a setting that exists half in the... -
Answered a Question in History
In regarding terrorism as resulting from the end of imperial systems, one can be guilty of oversimplification. But the "end of empire" has occurred in multiple times and places, which have clearly... -
Answered a Question in Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Blake was a progressive of his time. Like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and others, Blake believed that a huge injustice lay at the basis of contemporary society, with its... -
Answered a Question in Edgar Allan Poe
Practically all of Poe's major works have in common the elements of fear and terror. In "The Masque of the Red Death," a mysterious plague is the source of the terror. In "The Cask of Amontillado"... -
Answered a Question in An Episode of War
In "An Episode of War," one of the main factors the reader becomes aware of is the isolation of the men involved in combat. As in The Red Badge of Courage, Crane treats the Civil War generically,... -
Answered a Question in History
Until 1776, or even until 1783 when independence was finalized, many of the North American colonists continued to think of themselves as English. This in itself, perhaps paradoxically, is part of... -
Answered a Question in The Maltese Falcon
The principal woman character in The Maltese Falcon is Brigid O'Shaughnessy. On one level, she functions as the obvious femme fatale, a standard role in detective and crime stories to the point of... -
Answered a Question in A Soldier's Play
Any attempt to compare the stage and film versions of Charles Fuller's best-known work must start from the assumption that it's impossible for a movie director to preserve exactly the features of a... -
Answered a Question in Petrarch
The speaker in Sonnet 131 is lamenting the fact that his love is not returned, but simultaneously saying that he's triumphing over the situation. The basic message is that one can see or interpret... -
Answered a Question in River of Earth
Most readers today would require a kind of leap of faith to have a degree of reflexive insight into many of the events depicted in James Still's novel. The background Still describes in River of... -
Answered a Question in Literature
It is ironic that although the novella is titled The Power of Love, it ends in a rejection of love by the two women at the center of the story. Much of the narrative deals with the intense love,... -
Answered a Question in A Soldier's Play
The answer to this question, for most people, will probably be a generic one, not necessarily based on specific differences in plot, character, and theme between play and movie, but on the distinct... -
Answered a Question in The Lady of Shalott
Throughout his oeuvre, Tennyson was concerned obsessively with Britain's distant past. In The Lady of Shalott he creates a scenario tangential to the primal legend of King Arthur, who is not... -
Answered a Question in A Soldier's Play
Most audiences familiar with both the stage and cinematic versions of Charles Fuller's wartime story would probably observe that the film is relatively faithful to its source. In most cases... -
Answered a Question in To Sir, with Love
For those who have seen the film, it's difficult not to picture Braithwaite exactly as Sidney Poitier portrays him (with his named changed to Mr. Thackeray). Poitier was the perfect actor for the... -
Answered a Question in Golden Boy
In a stage play, when one speaks of narrative perspective, it necessarily means something different from say, the perspective or point of view in a novel, which may be written in the first person... -
Answered a Question in The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter is a historical novel, but it is also a transformation and reimagining of the past through the author's Romantic imagination. As such, it is not meant to be a literal depiction... -
Answered a Question in Native Son
The opening scene of Native Son is a harsh depiction of poverty in urban America. Bigger Thomas, his mother, his sister, and his brother all live in a cramped flat that makes privacy and comfort... -
Answered a Question in The Beach of Falesá
"The Beach of Falesá" is one of R. L. Stevenson's more naturalistic works, set in the present day and without the swashbuckling adventure of Kidnapped or the path-breaking science fiction of the... -
Answered a Question in King Lear
Edward Bond's Lear is, perhaps paradoxically, both an enhancement of the basic plot and themes of Shakespeare's King Lear and a kind of inversion of it. In Shakespeare, despite Lear's faults and... -
Answered a Question in Alfred Hitchcock
Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock's films overall are good examples of the cinematic techniques that convey various ideas and themes without necessarily using the direct communication through words found... -
Answered a Question in History
Modernization is a term that can be applied to many different activities and tendencies among people. The establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine, and the subsequent independence of... -
Answered a Question in Common Sense
Thomas Paine's writings are, taken as a whole, an iconic expression of not only the specific arguments in favor of American independence and democracy, but of the key elements of Enlightenment...
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