Has American lit become irrelevant?

The Nobel Prize committee seems to think so.

"...remarks by the secretive Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, suggesting that American writers were too much under the sway of American popular culture to qualify for the prize..."--NYT 10-9-2008, "French Writer Wins Nobel Prize" by Alan Cowell.

This echoes my own sentiments about our literature being too driven by "pop lit", which began with comments on Amazon's new book popularity contest. Go to discussion.

But artists are artists despite the political or economic or literary climate. I believe certainly that extraordinary literary writing is being put somewhere on the net even as I write. There's extraordinary, if invisible, talent out there.