The Scholar: Bailey Schiff

The Project: The Art of Drunken Boats and Bad Flowers: An Étude of the Poetry of Gautier, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud

The Essential Question: “I was studying to see if literature could be used as a catalyst to push for social change. To do this I brought in my language of interest, French, and I studied three different French authors to see what literary devices and rhetorical strategies they used throughout their work and if there was a relationship to the social movement that they were a part of. I chose them based on how radical they were at the beginning of each literary movement and their time period and then studied to see the covert ways that rhetoric was implemented into their work. Then I created my own poem, ‘French Poem of Today,’ implementing those rhetorical devices, and I talked about the immigration crisis.”