Closing the book on the zombie apocalypse?

"No More Zombies!" declares Adam Brooke Davis in a terrific essay in the Oct. 18 Chronicle of Higher Education, available online (here) only to subscribers. He writes about how difficult it is to persuade creative writing students to aspire beyond creating another chapter in the Zombie Apocalypse. My favorite paragraph concisely distinguishes among various types of popular fiction:

If it makes you want to buy something, it's advertising. If it makes you want to kill people, take their land, vote them in or out of office, it's propaganda. If it just jerks you around by your reproductive instincts, it's probably pornography. And if it's warning you of the dangers of not brushing your teeth, it's a public-service announcement.

What these genres tend not to be is art, although of course there are always exceptions. "There is, of course, nothing so vacuous and banal that a strong mind cannot make something meaningful out of it," admits Davis, "But some literary works sustain conversation, attention, and rereading more than others." A hundred years from now, will readers be more likely to reach for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or plain old Jane Austen?

Wait, don't answer that. I think I'm about to get really depressed.