And this is why, when I read American fiction, it's usually genre.

The head of the Nobel Prize Awards Committee on Literature has deemed American literature too "insular" to truly be able to win.  If, by this, he means "too self-introspective, caught up by pop culture, and too much all of the same," then I have to say I agree with him.

That's not to say that there aren't gems out there.  There are, after all, modern American writers that can tell a good story that holds the attention.  The problem is that these writers are either "genre," or extremely few and far between.  

The head of the Awards Committee said that American writers don't participate enough in the world of literary conversation, that they don't read enough of other culture's literature.  

Given the increasing views of English departments as irrelevant to the greater culture, I'd have to say he's right.  

The sad thing is that many English departments have made themselves irrelevant.  Rather than teaching the great works of literature that have formed whole cultures, they go political--teaching things from minority perspectives, or women's perspectives, or from "queer theory"--whatever's in style for the moment.  

That turns readers off.  Even English majors.  Yes, the theories are an interesting way to view the work, but when it becomes the be-all and end-all of literary studies, it makes students wonder why literature is studied at all, and why they should care about anything more than the current, navel-gazing pop culture cluttering popular literature.  And, of course, they write what they read, because that sells, right?  

I believe that the greater trends in teaching literature in higher education is what's leading the Nobel Prize Awards Commission to believe that an insular focus on our own culture is all there is to American literature.  And, for the most part, I think he's right.