IJ as the execution of E Unibus Pluram's program
This asks whether Infinite Jest is the fictional execution of the program Wallace laid out in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," his diagnosis of irony and television. What hangs on it is reading the novel and the essay as one project, with characters like Marathe voicing the essay's argument in disguise.
Adjudication
This crux has an adversarial ledger: The Novel's Structure. The per-reading verdicts are below.
Theories on this crux
| Reading | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Minor structure & design cruxes | favored |
Discussed in
- 1458 words on a book that has more than 1000 pages (SPEAK magazine interview with David Foster Wallace)
- A Sleek and Brilliant Monster: David Foster Wallace comes clean (Benjamin Weissman, LA Weekly Literary Supplement)
- An Interview with David Foster Wallace (David Wiley, Minnesota Daily A&E — full transcript)
- DFW interviewed by Terry Gross — Fresh Air, NPR (March 5, 1997)
- DFW on Infinite Jest — To the Best of Our Knowledge, Wisconsin Public Radio (October 20, 1996)
- David Foster Wallace remembered (Telegraph)
- Death Is Not the End: David Foster Wallace, His Legacy and His Critics
- Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- E Unibus Pluram → Infinite Jest (connections)
- I'm Hannah Smart who wrote the LARB \"Mister Squishy\" essay. I'm developing a DFW biography. AMA
- IJ Book Club Ep. 24 (S2 Ep 4): Shot in Sobriety — live close-read of the Ennet House shootout and the engineer snatch (pp. ~593–620s)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 38 (S3 Ep 4 by feed position): Full of the sound and fury... — the off-the-board roadmap session: the head-dig as settled fact, JOI's save-Joelle scheme, the hole-communication mechanism, and the who-is-the-plant fight (no new pages)
- Ich habe Angst vor uns (Miriam Böttger, Die Welt — Kultur, 3 Jan 2003)
- Infinite Cast Part 119: Reviewing Accomplice! (pp. 945–951) — commentary segment (~19 min): the irreconcilable father, IJ as a sex-negative book, the entertainment conundrum inverted
- Infinite Jest: To Be, or Not to Be (David Foster Wallace Lecture I) — Hardcore Literature lecture series, ep. I of IV, pages 1–233
- KUT Forum: David Foster Wallace, Essayist and Novelist (1997)
- La teoría literaria a comienzo del siglo XXI: post-postmodernidad en las letras estadounidenses
- Live with David Foster Wallace, Author of Infinite Jest (WORD e-zine live chat)
- Mapping the Zone Ep. 01: Wherein We Begin By Beginning — series-opening primer (DFW bio, influences, New Sincerity, composition history, adaptations); no book pages covered
- Mark Leyner Remembers David Foster Wallace: 'He Was the Opposite of an Arrogant, Swaggering Person'
- Nothing Ever Happens: \"Mister Squishy\" and the Year of the Sentence Diagram
- Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present
- Talking With... David Foster Wallace (Oregon Voice, April 1998 — full transcript)
- Television and Literature: David Foster Wallace's Concept of Image-Fiction
- The Crowd and the Individual: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo's Mao II on the Place of the Novel in the Age of Television
- The Eschatological Imagination: Mediating David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- The Fight: Considering David Foster Wallace Considering You
- The First (and Second) Coming of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
- The Panic of Influence
- The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace
Essays
- E Unibus Pluram and Infinite Jest: the essay that wrote the novel's thesis
- Girl With Curious Hair and Infinite Jest: the exorcism and the answer
- How Infinite Jest Was Read: 1996–2026
- Subsidized Time: the calendar as joke, cage, and dating puzzle
- The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest: the debut as prehistory
- Videophony
- What Wallace Said: The Author on Infinite Jest, 1996–2008