End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History

Argues that the academy's obsession with language, and in particular with narrative, has become a sort of disease.

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 MacIntyre, 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.

"End of Story is brilliant, quirky, original, passionate, and above all, different. It situates itself as an attack on some trends in contemporary thought, and reaches back to their earlier formation in the Western tradition: above all, the idea of life as project and a meaningful life as one out of which a successful quest narrative can be constructed; and it offers an alternative vision, not as a replacement, but as a complement--the vision of silence, as Sartwell calls it. In short, this is the book of someone who really thinks--a piece of real originality, not for the fainthearted, the staid, the conformist, or those intolerant of idiosyncrasy." -- Gary Saul Morson, author of Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time

"Wonderfully engaging; Sartwell succeeds in bringing together the personal with what is more generally considered philosophical, without sacrificing either. The arguments make sense and the examples are compelling; in a work largely concerned with narrative, the graceful use of stories is especially notable. The success of the intersection of personal with philosophical is demonstrated when one comes away liking the author along with his book, thinking that for someone who avoids people he would nonetheless make a marvelous dinner companion." -- Karmen MacKendrick, author of Counterpleasures

"I think that the book is useful as a kind of self-help book for academics suffering from overwork and general anxiety!" -- Alison Leigh Brown, author of Subjects of Deceit: A Phenomenology of Lying