Literature today, gone tomorrow

Richard Ohmann's essay sparks an idea (and not an original one). For kicks, here's my experiment, an inventory of my motivations for reading a few completed books:

"Love in the Time of Cholera," Marquez - saw the television preview of the novel's movie version
"Fasting, Feasting" Desai - a professor-required read for a postcolonial literature class
"The Cloister Walk," Norris - a professor-suggested read for a writing seminar class (also, it's not fiction - it's memoir, maybe that characteristic disqualifies it).
"Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," Maguire - saw the play
"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Twain - required for American literature class, plus it's bona fide canonical

Though I'd like to believe that free will and independent thought motivated my reading selections, I admit that I didn't read anything in the past...erm, ever...which wasn't first suggested to me by a superior source. The media, educated friends, professors, etcetera dictate my literary leanings. Granted, I choose from what they offer, but I rarely (never) choose outside their meticulously-compiled lists. Even givers of Barnes and Noble gift cards, though they don't direct me to specific books, certainly direct me to a specific, market-dictated/dictating source; once at the source, I am directed by advertisements and best-seller tables, pointing me to novels I probably wouldn't think to select of my own volition. Without their direction, I possess no knowledge of good taste.

Anyway, I arrive at an ordinary and unimpressive conclusion: Ohmann's got a point. I am, we are, in fact, influenced by a sort of capitalistic, top-down, funneled system of choosing which dictates good taste long before we know to think of it ourselves. (Surprise!) Most of 0ur literary choices, like most of the rest of our consumer choices, are chosen for us. Reminds me of the scene from the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" in which Meryl Streep's ice queen character lectures Anne Hathaway's character on the origin of her cerulean sweater and her utter lack of choice in donning it.

However, Ohmann specifies that these principles pertain to the period 1960-1975; he also qualifies that the canon of this period, though established for a period of 15ish years, reserves a fluidity of definition. Many of these books "have as yet a chance of becoming canonical," he writes. That is, time - and its many factors - continually alter, shift, evolve, transform the contents of the canon.

Ok, so what about now? What determines our modern literary canon now? Or, what is literature now? Has our society changed so much in the past decades that the same market (and other) principles don't wield the same power? Ohmann references the boom of the advertising industry, namely mass-circulation magazines, as influential in the canon-shaping shift, but modern morphings aren't his point.

At a brainstorming level, here are some contemporary canon-shaping powerhouses:
the Internet. Obviously. And its implications on the "literary" definition merit a canon of essays itself.
Oprah. I'm not kidding. A shout-out by this media maven most certainly boosts book sales. Consider the recent "Eat, Pray, Love," "A Million Little Pieces," and, well, her entire book list network.
For that matter, TV talking heads in general.
Cinema. Movies have a strange way of working to a novel's advantage in reverse. Novel gets published, popularity minor, novel spawns movie, popularity exponentially increases. As if the novel only gains merit from a shortened, sensationalized (always? another thought...) counterpart. (More on that assertion later. Not so sure.)

But here still I join Ohmann: does economic popularity necessarily determine literary quality? (Surely not, I'd assert.) Does it guarantee canonical admittance? Can a novel maintain literary status one day and forfeit it the next? Is it always "literature"? After all, if Ohmann asserts that novels can be added to the canon as time progresses, then novels can also be subtracted from the canon as time progresses. If, like the novel "Love Story" he references, a novel enjoys popularity in literary circles for a span of a decade and then falls from its reign, is it 'literature for a day, gone tomorrow'?

In high school, my parents felt bothered by our curriculum's failure to embrace "classic"-ly canonical works in favor of modern novels. Maybe, however, it amounts not to a fall from culture but a revision of the literary canon?