It’s often hard to know when an era begins and ends, but the recent deaths of the novelist Toni Morrison (in August) and the literary scholar Harold Bloom (on Monday) make a case for putting the era of literary canon wars to rest.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Bloom and Ms. Morrison stood on opposite sides of a cultural debate about what to read in college and, more broadly, about how to read. Mr. Bloom defended education as a process of intense personal engagement with great works, envisioned as a way to “enlarge a solitary existence.” He viewed the traditional Western canon as the time-tested subject of that engagement and even produced a list to clarify which literary works he considered part of it.

Ms. Morrison viewed literary canons as the contingent products of history and associated forms of domination and erasure, not as the timeless embodiments of universal human experiences or values. She championed writing, scholarship and teaching as a process of reclaiming that historical complexity. Her priorities, which were shared by a generation of scholars pursuing race-, gender- and cultural studies-based approaches in the humanities, led toward a diversification of the canon.

The “culture wars” of the next few decades owed much to these two positions. Both camps became preoccupied with what texts were being assigned in classrooms. The college syllabus became a contested document, suddenly capable of holding Western civilization to its ideals or hastening its decline.