Which of the following sentences contains an oxymoron? a. productions by the drama class were beginning that autumn after midterm exams. b. mr. griffin's speech before the assembly of 10th graders was short and to the point. c. students filed quickly into the auditorium, hoping to find out about the new schedule. d. after everyone flew out of the auditorium, gabe and brian were left alone together.

"character is what you are in the dark." dwight lyman moody, in this very witty quotation of his, states we act and think differently when we are "in the dark", that is, when the spotlight is not on us and everyone can see us and consequently judge us. when reading, we tend to be sympathetic to some characters and their dilemmas. by being so, we are saying to ourselves that we agree with those characters' acts and choices, even if they are morally questionable if we have common sense in mind. dwight lyman moody's quotation applies very well to "crime and punishment", by   19th century russian writer fiodor dostoyevsky. raskolnikov, the main character, a former law student who spends his days reflecting upon life and its misery, draws a fatal conclusion: mankind is divided in two main categories: ordinary and extraordinary people. the first are the ones who lead a run-of-the-mill existence and are full of imperfections; the latter are the ones who are spiritually superior, the ones who always know better, and have the right to judge the ordinary ones, as well as eliminate them if for common good. raskolnikov considers himself as belonging to the extraordinary category and decides to kill an old lady who is a money lender and in whose house he rents a small room. raskolnikov compares himself to napoleon, who had the undeniable right to execute tons of people during the war in order to save his nation. of course what the main character decides to do is a horrendous crime, but as readers we feel it is the right thing for him to do, since the victim is a mean old woman who only thinks about money and keeps humiliating her younger sister. what one experiences is a mixture of sympathy and empathy for the character, even though he decides to commit homicide, which is not at all accepted or tolerated by civilized citizens. however, since readers are "in the dark", they allow themselves to feel in ways they would probably never dare to confess to anyone, no matter how nasty or vicious a character can be. after all, they are just reading and doing no harm. in other words, readers are in the dark and can be who they are without being judged.

awnser:

the thousand and one nights – or, as i prefer to call them in the following forpurely practical reasons: the arabian nights – as we perceive them three hundredyears after antoine galland’s epochal french adaptation bear a distinct arabicimprint. meanwhile, the commonly accepted model for their textual historyacknowledges various stages in the conceptualization and effective formation ofboth the collection’s characteristic frame story and the embedded repertoire. thevast majority of tales in the preserved manuscripts of the nights has beenintegrated into the collection during two periods of arabic influence, the so-calledbaghdad and cairo periods (gerhardt 1963: 115–374). these “arabic” stages arepreceded by an iranian version, probably dating to pre-islamic times, which in itsturn profits from both structural devices and narrative contents originating fromindian tradition. considering the eminent position that iran and iranian culturehold in the early stages of the textual history of the arabian nights, surprisinglyfew details are known concerning the collection’s relation to and its actualposition within the iranian cultural context. in the following, i will discuss linksbetween the arabian nights and iranian culture on several levels. in surveyingthese links, i will treat five major areas: (1) the iranian prototype of the nights; (2) tales of alleged persian origin; (3) persian characters within the tales; (4)persian translations of the arabian nights; and (5) the position of the arabiannights in modern iran