In other words, history will decide on its own accord, which has nothing to do with your best effort to give a full picture of the current literary process (mainstream and not):
Certainly, there are endless books being written. Worldwide, more than 100,000 novels are published in English each year. Even the prize-winners run into scores. So the first challenge is which authors to teach – the celebrities, those who sold most? – and the second what to say about them. “Here, if we could recognize it”, wrote Virginia Woolf. contemplating new titles in a bookshop, “lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age when we lie prone and silent…”. But it was “oddly difficult”, she continued, to say “which are the real books and what it is that they are telling us, and which are the stuffed books which will come to pieces when they have lain about for a year or two”.So, if we teach contemporary literature, we must do so with the sobering awareness that we may well be teaching also-rans. Any number of authors as celebrated in their day as Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith are today have long been forgotten. Who was reputed “the most published man of the nineteenth century” and “the most popular writer of his time”? Not Dickens, but G. M. W. Reynolds. Hardly a household name. ©
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