End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History (SUNY, 2000) Against narrative: eating MacIntyre and Ricoeur with the moths of Bataille and Thoreau. Still-life painting.

Review from *Choice* by R. Cormier, 5/01:
Engaging, passionate, and above all quirky, this brief contribution to the philosophy of language fuses the personal (even autobiographical) and the conceptual (e.g. cyclical time). Sartwell here casts a wide net into the broad sea of narrativity. His focus on teleology and postmodernism is particularly muscular and convincing. The discussions of time, action, value, history, and human identity, especially in the context of relevant thinkers like Ricoeur and Bataille, lead the reader into uncharted and always interesting territory. Along the way Sartwell cites, among others, the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, Pascal, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Deleuze/Guattari, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Apart from their discursive style and sometimes colloquial language, the author's forays into other fields result in some priceless observations; e.g., of art history he writes: Art on [sic] my view is a form of immersion and connection; art is a way of entering deeply into relationship with non-human materials and with human communities."
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