‘Ofer eall wifa cyn’: Cultivating Female Agency in David Foster Wallace’s <i>Infinite Jest</i> and Cynewulf’s <i>Juliana</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Foster Wallace situates “Infinite Jest” within the tradition of English literary history by mirroring the narrative of Hamlet. This literary-historical grounding intensifies the critical allure of Wallace’s reference to Old English by way of Cynewulf’s “Juliana.” I contend that, in “Infinite Jest,” Joelle van Dyne’s struggle for an independent identity can be read as a parallel to Juliana’s cultivation of an autonomous self through social defiance. For both women, their struggles for autonomy are marked by continued reliance on male figures: Joelle must socially and psychologically maneuver male relationships in order to fashion a sense of independence; similarly, Juliana attempts to construct a strong identity founded on her Christian faith, but this is potentially undercut by her reliance on a specifically male God. The women’s narratives are distinguished by their successes rather than their failures, which are reinforced through tropological elements of Old English exile. The duality between Joelle and Juliana highlights Wallace’s attempt to depict the perpetuation of historical gender roles, while the self-consciousness of his postmodern prose indicates his deep desire to grapple with the social issues that not only pervade literature today but have been woven into the fabric of English literary and social history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".