"An Anguish Become Thing": Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's <i>Infinite Jest</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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 it