End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History

In End of Story, Crispin Sartwell maintains that the academy is obsessed with language, and with narrative in particular. Narrative has been held to constitute or explain time, action, value, history, and human identity. Sartwell argues that this obsession with language and narrative has become a sort of disease. Pitting such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Bataille, and Epictetus against the narrativism of Mac Intyre, Ricoeur, and Aristotle, Sartwell celebrates the ways narratives and selves disintegrate and recommends a lapse into ecstatic or mundane incoherence. As the book rollicks through Wodehouse, Thoreau, the Book of Job, still-life painting, and Sartwell’s autobiography, there emerges a hopeful if bizarre new sense of who we are and what we can be. Additional ISBNs079144726X, 0791447251, 9780791447260, 9780791447253End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History is written by Crispin Sartwell and published by Suny Press. ISBNs for End of Story are 9780791491836, 0791491838 and the print ISBNs are 9780791447260, 079144726X. Additional ISBNs include 079144726X, 0791447251, 9780791447260, 9780791447253.