Early last year, the small magazine n+1 reiterated a longstanding policy. No dead people. Reading work from dead authors may be inevitable, but as literary critics tasked with creating and shaping the conversation, writing about dead people was considered unacceptable — because it was unfair to expect that contemporary writers, already struggling to secure attention for their work, compete with their predecessors. We need, n+1 argued, to “redirect the public’s attention to the under-read work of the living.” (Source)
This quote about N+1 makes my point for me about how the generations born in recent decades--say since the 1970s--are being sealed into the TCM because of how the universities and broader culture world are serving its interests whether they realize it or not.
If we only read the living, we're dead. How can it be otherwise in a hollowed-out, dying culture.