Infinite majesty : disabled and athletic métis in David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As John Jeremiah Sullivan remarks in his introduction to String Theory, a collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis, tennis “may be [Wallace’s] most consistent theme at the surface level.” As once an elite junior professional himself, Wallace reflects on and writes from his own involvement in the sport, with the conditioning, strategy, and body-mind training that goes into it. In other essays of String Theory, Wallace reaches beyond his personal playing experience, observes professional tennis players with their incredible grace, and creates his own tennis playing students in Infinite Jest. Throughout these fictional and nonfictional accounts, he conceptualizes what such eminent athleticism entails. This paper will show that celebrated athleticism in Wallace’s work exhibits an embodimental métis, or an acute, crafty body-mind knowledge of its movement through space. Beyond only characterizing athletic movement, however, this paper argues that the same concept of métis extends to people with disabilities, including characters with disabilities in Infinite Jest. The same hyperawareness of corporeality, versatile methods of adjusting to oppositional contexts, and extraordinary complexity are shared by both groups. Using rhetorical scholarship on métis and disability theories of embodiment and social representation, this paper will draw parallels between the moving body-minds of athletic and disabled bodies and trace the implications of this analogy for Wallace’s work and disability studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".