Interactive Oral Research 2017
The Interactive Oral is designed to give students the chance to lead discussions, with each student
assigned one topic to enhance the group's appreciation of culture and context. This can help us appreciate
where a writer is "coming from", as well as to situate a work in a specific setting (time & place). This blog
offers a format for your research and makes it "visible" in process. You should prepare material for a class
discussion on May 23rd - and post it here. I want you to be as creative as possible in your postings; use
pictures, clips, links to articles, as well as quotes from the novel and, of course, your own comments and
questions. You may research your topic on the internet, but take care with the validity of your sources.
Online databases such as Questiaschool.com and JSTOR are more reliable, and academic, than stuff
dredged up on Google. Be sure to cite all sources accurately. When you present, you will be expected to
talk about your findings using your posts and notes to convey the information, but you cannot simply read
from a text or a prepared script. The research you do should provoke a student-centered and organic
conversation centered on the Interactive Oral topics.
Here then are some topics from which to select:

Patrick Suskind’s biography

Conditions in Paris in the 1700s

Making perfumes and their use

18th century science

Political allegory dealing with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich

The olfactory sense, knowledge and memory

Urban versus rural settings - Paris and Grasse

Gender Theory (how men and women are portrayed)

The 18th century class system (social and economic classes)

Psychoanalytic Critical Theory

Religious Allusions and Satire

Social conditions leading to the French Revolution

Nietzsche and Übermensch

Bildungsroman & other literary precedents to Perfume

Enlightenment Ideals & Philosophers

Superstition

Romanticism and the 18th Century

Serial killers

Perfume - (2006) movie compared to the novel
Interactive Oral Research 2017
The Interactive Oral is designed to give students the chance to lead discussions, with each student
assigned one topic to enhance the group's appreciation of culture and context. This can help us appreciate
where a writer is "coming from", as well as to situate a work in a specific setting (time & place). This blog
offers a format for your research and makes it "visible" in process. You should prepare material for a class
discussion on May 23rd - and post it here. I want you to be as creative as possible in your postings; use
pictures, clips, links to articles, as well as quotes from the novel and, of course, your own comments and
questions. You may research your topic on the internet, but take care with the validity of your sources.
Online databases such as Questiaschool.com and JSTOR are more reliable, and academic, than stuff
dredged up on Google. Be sure to cite all sources accurately. When you present, you will be expected to
talk about your findings using your posts and notes to convey the information, but you cannot simply read
from a text or a prepared script. The research you do should provoke a student-centered and organic
conversation centered on the Interactive Oral topics.
Here then are some topics from which to select:

Patrick Suskind’s biography

Conditions in Paris in the 1700s

Making perfumes and their use

18th century science

Political allegory dealing with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich

The olfactory sense, knowledge and memory

Urban versus rural settings - Paris and Grasse

Gender Theory (how men and women are portrayed)

The 18th century class system (social and economic classes)

Psychoanalytic Critical Theory

Religious Allusions and Satire

Social conditions leading to the French Revolution

Nietzsche and Übermensch

Bildungsroman & other literary precedents to Perfume

Enlightenment Ideals & Philosophers

Superstition

Romanticism and the 18th Century

Serial killers

Perfume - (2006) movie compared to the novel