World Literature
Professor Johns
5 December 2014
Charles Simic Modernist literature was mainly a fictional English genre of writing, from the early 1900’s into the 1960’s. Due to the increasing of industrialization and globalization modernist was molded into its own. The terrifying events War World I and War World II and the new inventions of technology made many people question the world as they knew it. Contemporary literature can be defined as literature with its setting generally after World War II and extends to current day but is still widely argued today. This literary era defines a time period, but it also describes a particular style and quality of writing. Most people see this era as an extension of postmodern literature, …show more content…
Many of the most successful writers are those who are cross-cultural. Writers like Simic who have lived in more than one world are what make for interesting art. Simic is interesting because of his expressionistic aspects as well as that search for identity. If you can imagine in a cross-cultural reality, you grow up in one cultural and move to another. Identity and what it means, who are you, is a huge quest in his writing as well as writers in transcultural and international pieces. What does it mean to be an immigrant? To have grown up in war, living on the streets of New York City, with your first language being Yugoslavia and your second being English would not be the easiest thing. He’s mining his own childhood, mining his memories, and bringing those to the floor relatively. That inner quest for who am I? What does it mean to be this kind of person in this situation? Where are we going? All of these characteristics are very much an interest to contemporary …show more content…
Simic is known for being dark and depressing, for an example in his piece, A Book Full of Pictures he writes, “With my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches”. Based on reading this poem and the specific quote you can tell how uncommon his writing is. Simic uses words like death, dark, cold, and black (Benjamin, 2013). For an example in his poem A Book Full of Pictures he describes his mother’s knitting needles the color black, “like the inside of my head just then”. Although most of his poetry is depressing many people still like his writing. Simic always seems to write about personal things, but in almost everyone he appears to add a hint of fiction, or something to make the poem more interesting to read. You can see this in one of the excerpts from A Book Full of Pictures, “The pages I turned sounded like wings. The soul is a bird”, he said. Reading this poem you can tell that his imagination is never ending, and he really wants you to imagine yourself being in that