Economists who think they know how to bolster our economy consistently exhort us with that well-worn phrase "buy American." But the experts who think they know how to look after our intellect apparently won't give a second look at American literature from across the pond.Before choosing French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio as the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, Swedish Academy secretary Horace Engdahl mentioned to The Associated Press that "Europe is still the center of the literary world," that American writers "don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature" and that they are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture." He went so far as to say that American writers' "ignorance" of greater literary interactions is "restraining" in terms of global recognition.

Engdahl is better-read than I, for one, could ever hope to be. He is intelligent and educated, no doubt a master of understanding and judging the written word. But this is one case in which the experts are thoroughly wrong.

As Charles McGrath observed in an Oct. 4 New York Times article, the Swedish Academy has of late tended to approve of authors with distinct leftist political leanings, especially if those authors tend to use the fantastical rather than the realistic in their narratives and most especially if a dislike for American policies and cultures comes hand-in-hand with a dislike for realism and rightists (see Harold Pinter for details).

Recent non-American winners like Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee and Orhan Pamuk fit the bill, criticizing their countries' cultures and politics with literary flair; they of course deserve the academic attention or leisure time of any university student. In fact, reading novels, plays, poetry or essays by foreign authors broadens our perspective both cultural and literary. Pamuk's Snow, for example, is a poetic education on political and religious tensions in Turkey.

We do, however, go to school in the United States, the country where most of us grew up. I do not have the education or authority to disparage Engdahl's opinions on American writers, but I can say that for the reading, thinking university population here in the United States, there is incredible value in reading modern American authors' works on American topics that would never come close to gaining the Swedish Academy's approval.

Engdahl claims that American writers alter their work to fit trends in mass culture, but there are many notable American writers who use their work to criticize elements of mass culture, be it the iron fist of capitalism throttling artistic thought or the fanatical desire to preserve the American Way stifling openness and justice.

An author need not be obscure and European to provide some mind-broadening experience: A non-Jewish student reading Philip Roth might gain insight into what his Jewish classmates' culture holds, and other American authors like Tim O'Brien and Toni Morrison (the last American to win the Nobel in literature, in 1993) give emotional context for tortured eras in American history whose legacy affects our economy, our society and our thought.

University students tend to be eager to prove their intellectual superiority, sometimes resorting to captiousness or apologism to accomplish this lofty goal. With this in mind, it is easy to take the supposed high road and disparage American literature along with American mass culture, siding with the Europhiles in pushing aside that shallow modern American fiction. But in terms of self-education alone, we students might benefit from as much literary jingoism as xenophilia. We don't want to read, but by jingo if we do, we've got the Roth; we've got the Plath; we've got McCarthy, too.