End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History

by Crispin Sartwell

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.

150 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

Crispin Sartwell was born 6.20.58 in DC. His Dad (and his and his) were DC newspapermen. His Mom and Step-pa were high school teachers and later organic farmers. He got kicked out of the public school system in tenth grade for fomenting revolution, and attended the New Education Project, aka Bonzo Ragamuffin Prep, then U Maryland, Johns Hopkins, UVA. He worked as a copy boy in 1980-81 at the Washington Star, where he started writing about pop music. He was a freelance rock critic through the eighties for, among others the Balt City Paper, Record Mag, High Fidelity, and Melody Maker.

He lives in Glen Rock, PA with his wife, the writer Marion Winik, and their five children. He's Visiting Associate Prof of Political Science at Dickinson College. He writes a weekly op-ed column, distributed by Creators Syndicate. He has also appeared in Harper's, the Washington Post, and on Weekend All Things Considered.

He is the author and editor of a number of books, and he's taught philosophy and communications at Vanderbilt, the Unversity of Alabama, and Penn State Harrisburg.