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. 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. The “culture wars” of the next few decades owed much to these two positions. The college syllabus became a contested document, suddenly capable of holding Western civilization to its ideals or hastening its decline.

Source: New York Times October 19, 2019 18:22 UTC