"An Anguish Become Thing": Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's <i>Infinite Jest</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clearly, David Foster Wallace has an interest in performance and its complex dynamic, because Infinite Jest, his second novel, thematizes performance. Its tripartite plot, set in the early twenty-first century, revolves around prep school tennis players who aspire to play professionally, to join the "show" (Wallace's term); a group of Québécois terrorists' histrionically violent acts to secure a videotape—perhaps entitled Infinite Jest—that will be an ultimate guerilla weapon, for when it is viewed, it causes death; and drug addicts in whom, Wallace suggests, addiction is the ultimate, personal, self-destructive, deconstructing performance. "Thematizing" performance may be too mild a term, in fact, for what Wallace does: he eviscerates performance, showcasing the obsessive practice that must precede it (in the case of tennis), the twisted narrative around it (with terrorism), and its possibly lethal entrapment (in the case of the videotape and with addiction).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".