What the hell is 'The Great American Novel?'

A logical place to start as any is 'what is a Great American Novel'? I'll start by saying I am in search of a Great American Novel not The. It would seem GANs are seen as singular, the definitive representation of their time. Population growth is accelerating, and now with blogging everyone can be a writer. There is a whole lot of people. The world is a seemingly bigger place then it used to be, so to expect one book of thousands to be the GAN of our time seems silly.

Furthermore, I can't help but think the perspective of 'the great' is rolling over to the Great Man theory of history. The theory suggests history is the story of great human after great human and what those humans have done to change the world. The counter argument is that man is shaped by his society, and ultimately man would not exist without it. While not denying the influence of individual actors, I am wont to believe that history is a collective tale.

Anywho, A good place to start as any would be to define my parameters of a GAN. I am going to suggest the revolutionary thesis that it should be great, american and novel. I am using these words in a broad sense.

1. Great: For now I will put aside the notion of great as qualitative. The Great in GAN explicitly refers to this sense of the word, but the quantitative definition of great better serves my purposes. The GAN should be great in scope. It could be a microcosm of American experience, but ultimately should reflect our larger whole. In some way it should be an encapsulation of our time. Here are some features of current day America/Earth I am hoping to find discussed in a beautiful, revolutionary manner:

-The economy. Y'know, unemployment, the financial crisis, all that.
-The burgeoning revolutionary spirit. What I always found interesting about the Occupy movement was that it actually exists, that there are some people are showing outspoken dissent. I think this feeling is growing world-wide. See: Greece riots, Middle-Eastern revolutions, etc.
-Technology and its implications. This means the internet (Youtube, Google), smart-phones, social media, video games, all of it.
-Late/post/whatever Capitalism. We've been doing this capitalist thing for a while and it only seems to be furthering. Advertising is getting into everything. There are ads everywhere. I am waiting for the day that there are ads in videogame loading screens.
-The apocalypse as predicted by the scientists, Christians, Mayans and others.

2. American: The novel has to be American. The topic, place or theme should be explicitly related to the USA. One can write about alienation, but ultimately it should be about American alienation. Does the writer need to be American though? I don't necessarily thing so. As globalization increases it seems more and more legitimate that the writer of a GAN could be unamerican. What if they have never been to America and it is only a hypothesis of what it is like? A critique? What if the novel doesn't take place in America but regardless is explicitly about America? Perhaps I am being a bit open about the whole thing, but as far as I see this whole GAN debacle is up in the air.
3. Novel: There should be something explicitly new about it. Be it style, genesis, content, ideas, or formatting it needs to be at least a bit of a game changer. Break post-modernism to pieces, make a newer sentence, redefine the definition of prose, beautifully express the current human condition, any of these things.

The ever reliable Wikipedia basically states it should be an accurate zeitgeist of the times. It goes on to say that though the term is singular, the book that is the GAN is constantly changing.

The provided list is as follows:

19th century

• 1851: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
• 1884: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

20th century

• 1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
• 1936: William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
• 1938: John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy
• 1939: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
• 1951: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
• 1952: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
• 1953: Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March
• 1955: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
• 1960: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
• 1973: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
• 1975: William Gaddis's J R^[17]
• 1985: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West
• 1987: Toni Morrison's Beloved
• 1997: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

21st century

• 2010: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom
  
  In my research I stumbled upon a fellow blogger taking on the respectable pursuit of reading all these books.
  
  I'm going to peruse the internet, compile some lists, and get back to you all. Additionally, I plan to investigate criticism, and contemporary candidates for a GAN. My hope is to split this 50/50 between old and new.
  
  What are some additional candidates you might add to this list?