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Originally Posted by demonrail666
The contemporary is always about sorting through. That's its problem and its excitement, depending on you. The past comes pre-filtered. Imagine how many crap novels Russians had to wade through in the 19th C before discovering a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky, or even a Turgenev or a Gogol. The past is settled for us, just as, I imagine, our contemporary will be for future generations. Lit studies will run their 'millennial fiction' courses (or whatever they decide to call our cultural age) and speak only about Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo and a handful of others, blissfully unaware (hopefully) of names like Michael Cunningham and all those other flash-in-the-pans that we've had to deal with.
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that's a pretty good analysis there. One of the nice things about new literature is the discovery factor. One of the nice things about the classics is realizing just how good lit can be.