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I'm not overflowing with examples because I actively avoid most of the stuff, but I can offer a few, direct and indirect.
Bless Me Ultima, a babbies first lit book assigned in an institution of higher learning.
Indirectly, Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy. A friend was enthusiastic about the book, and neither they, the wikipedia article, nor reading a few passages myself revealed why.
Bonus: the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Theoretically, these texts fit the particular shapes of some particular population's mind, sure. But when I try to engage with the people actually claiming to find value on what value they find, I am left mystified or alienated.
All of "literature" ostensibly states it's trying to find "deeper truths to the human condition" or something. I think, at its best, literature is a kind of compliment to moral philosophy. It wrestles with the Big Questions - Why are we here? What does it mean?
The reality is that 80% of literature is just aesthetic mood affiliation and fashion. Over at Scott's Blog, they just had some millenial (!) post a review of David Foster Wallace's last book. David Foster Wallace was probably a genius, and he used that genius to write thousands of pages of Gen-X nonsense .... and Gen-x (and I guess millienials now) love him for it. He was very, very, very cool.
Charles Bukowski wasn't very cool when he was alive (except in Germany for some reason). At the end of his life and after he died, he became cool in (another) post-ironic "dirtbags are cool" way. He started popping up in literature classes at Bard and Oberlin. That was a real shame. The hipsters turn him into this "poet of the streets" when, in reality, Charles Bukowski wrote about real truth in life - a lot of it is desperate, gross, weak characters mutually exploiting one another to get through the day. Forget the intellectual goofyness of "making the profane divine" ... Sometimes life is just cheap whiskey and run down whores in East L.A.
I don't think literature is important because I don't think there's enough of it that can be generalized. Use my DFW example - there are people who love him dearly. I appreciate their love for him, but I never will. "Well, you don't have to love him, but can't you learn something from him?" No. No I can't. It's all too personal, too mood affiliation, too "what's your aesthetic?"
I'll quibble with DFW's work being nonsense.
It's dizzying, which is not the same thing. It's trying to capture the feeling of the modern world in all of its immense alienating complexity down to the mundane.
If you wanted to explain the feeling of living in our era to someone from 100 years ago, Infinite Jest would be more helpful than a history book in the same way that reading Burroughs is more helpful to understand the feeling of living 100 years ago.
There's lots of people you can accuse of being rote postmodernists with no ideas but the butchering of what is, they run most of entertainment right now. David Foster Wallace is not one of them.
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