End of Story

<p><b>Argues that the academy's obsession with language and in particular with narrative has become a sort of disease.</b></p><p>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.</p>