John Duvall

About

John Duvall is the Margaret Church Distinguished Professor of English and serves as the Interim Department Head at Purdue University's College of Liberal Arts. His research primarily focuses on 20th and 21st-century American fiction, with particular interests in modernism, postmodernism, and issues of racial and sexual identity within these contexts. Recently, Duvall has examined modernist print culture, leading to the publication of a scholarly edition of William Faulkner's 1949 collection of detective fiction, Knight's Gambit, which he restored to include more than 4,000 works cut by magazine editors. This edition was published in 2022 and released as a Vintage International trade paperback by Penguin Random House in 2024. Duvall has authored several influential books, including Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction, Don DeLillo's UNDERWORLD, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness, and Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities. He has also edited seven essay collections on topics ranging from 9/11 narratives to modernist and postmodernist literary approaches. His scholarly work contributes significantly to the understanding of American fiction, modernist print culture, and issues of identity in literature.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Law
• History
• Biology
• Art
• Simulation
• Literature
• Geography

Selected publications

• Narrating 9/11

  Modern fiction studies · 2011-09-01 · 29 citations

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  Narrating 9/11 John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec It has now been a decade since a group of nineteen men affiliated with al-Qaeda—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirate, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt—hijacked four US airliners and flew two of them into the World Trade Center towers, another into the Pentagon, while the fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania when the passengers attempted to retake the cockpit. Despite Paul Greengrass’s film United 93 (2006) that depicts…

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• 30@30: the future of literary thinking

  Textual Practice · 2016-11-09 · 4 citations

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  All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

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• Homeland Security and the State of (American) Exception(alism): Jess Walter’s The Zero and the Ethical Possibilities of Postmodern Irony

  Studies in the novel · 2013-06-01 · 4 citations

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  Homeland Security and the State of (American) Exception(alism):Jess Walter’s The Zero and the Ethical Possibilities of Postmodern Irony John N. Duvall Our complicity begins with our country’s reaction to [the 9/11 attacks] and our failure…to debate the response honestly. The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay—these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists. —Jess Walter, “A Conversation with Jess…

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• Cricket Field of Dreams: Queer Racial Identifications in Joseph O'Neill's<i>Netherland</i>

  Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction · 2014-08-06 · 3 citations

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  Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is less a novel about a multicultural post-9/11 America than it is a wistful story of lost Orientalized interracial male love in which Hans van der Broek mourns for the dead Trinidadian immigrant Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans's memories of their shared passion for cricket casts the sport as a form of sexual pleasure (even as actual sexual pleasure threatens Hans's sense of self) and queers the narrative's heteronormative resolution.

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• Introduction: A story of the stories of American fiction after 1945

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2011-12-08 · 3 citations

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  This may well be the last volume ever to survey American fiction from 1945 to the present. That is not because scholarship on this body of narrative is waning. Far from it. There is a more pragmatic reason for my prediction: the period is getting a little long in the tooth. The Victorian Era will never exceed sixty-four years. Modernism is often dated from 1890 to 1945 (a solid fifty-six-year run), but the post-1945 period (which until recently we simply called “postmodernism”), if a person, cou…

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Frequent coauthors

• Paul Sheehan

  Macquarie University

  1 shared

• Philip Weinstein

  University of Adelaide

  1 shared

• Alexander Lee

  University of Pennsylvania

  1 shared

• Keith Byerman

  1 shared

• Laura E. Tanner

  1 shared

• Rita Felski

  University of Virginia

  1 shared

• Marjorie Perloff

  Stanford University

  1 shared

• Keston Sutherland

  1 shared

Similar researchers at Purdue University

• Michael Johnstonh-53
• Robert Paul Lambh-36
• Arkady Plotnitskyh-20