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

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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. …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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