Summary Of Emily Russell's 'The Embodied Politics Of Infinite Jest'

Emily Russell’s Some Assembly Required: An Article Review
Emily Russell in her article, “Some Assembly Required: The Embodied Politics of Infinite Jest” argues that assemblage is used in David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest to criticize the social norms of the body promoted by media, society, and pop culture. Russell's argument stems from Wallace's nonlinear approach and unproportioned representation of the characters and narrative. A tennis player is present with one limb longer than the other, an NFL punter with an abnormally muscular leg. The narrative itself is disjointed jumping back continuously from the past and present and details appear in the novel which never finds resolution such as the origin of a character’s speech disability.

Russell takes all her evidence and examples and relates it back to Infinite Jest by comparing her statements to a single character, in this case, Stice a famous tennis player in the novel, “resembles a poorly spliced photo, some superhuman cardboard persona with a hole for your human face. A beautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth—like a Polycleitos body, or Hermes or Theseus before his trials, "(637). Russell takes a metaphor to describe Stice as evidence within the novel to back up her claim that David Foster Wallace intentionally implemented the assembled body within his text. Throughout the novel that same procedure is repeated. Russell’s process is that she suggests a claim, takes a quote or more than often a character or series of characters within the novel, and backs up her claims using a range of different articles or sources strengthening her credibility. Russell’s outline makes her essay easy to follow as well as stacking a diverse range of evidence to back up her claim
Amazingly Russell slowly builds upon her argument throughout the novel. The slow-paced essay does a great job spacing out all her evaluations and claims without it feeling too overwhelming for the reading

The Arizona Quarterly releases four volumes a year in the format of spring, summer, autumn, and winter releases. Its most recent issue is the 73rd, number 3, autumn 2017 edition, which includes essays discussing the form of politics, the idea of Utopia in comparison to the works of Whitman and Hawthorne as well as a representation of spectral subjects in historical crime