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.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Putting Language in Its Place
1. Telos and Torture
2. Sign and Sin
3. History and Multiplicity
4. Presence and Fate
Index
About the author
Crispin Sartwell is Chair of Humanities and Sciences at Maryland Institute, College of Art. He is the author of several books, including
The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions and
Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality, also published by SUNY Press.
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