David Cantrell
Adjunct Professor of Law
A graduate of Harvard and Stanford, David Cantrell is a Visiting Professor of Law and Literature; he also teaches in the English Department at USD. Trained in the literary, social, and political histories of the United States, from the revolutionary and early republican periods to the Great War, the Red Scare, and the Great Migration, Professor Cantrell offers courses at the Law School organized around historical and institutional questions of human and political emancipation. He is interested both in the creative response of literary intellectuals to legal developments and in the poetics of legal thought. Professor Cantrell’s current project, entitled Home Rule: Cultural Redemption and Political Disappointment in U. S. Literature, 1832-1919, is concerned with the continuing effects of the nineteenth century’s unfinished revolution upon literary culture. The general argument is that, if the melancholy of much American literature issues from the common, though unequally shared experience of deep political disappointment, then the pervasive feeling that the absent nation should console for personal losses is inseparably related to the demands of those who have lost most. The larger argument is that, in the wake of Reconstruction, American literature’s failed imagination of collective life is determined not only by the nation-state which emerged after 1877 as if redeemed from its commitments to African Americans, but by the interests and desires of peoples otherwise forcibly excluded from the state and segregated from its “culture.” As these determinations are most visibly recorded in images of “black” speech, so the work focuses on the phonographies of “white” writing, attending to the diverse ways in which the latter’s romances are reinscribed by the otherwise inadmissible address of Reconstruction’s continuing work. Professor Cantrell’s second book is a study of the relations between Native-American and African-American conceptions of nationalism in the antebellum South. He has also begun a novel, Blue Eagle, on mill village life in the aftermath of the Gastonia labor strike of 1929, though he expects it to be published posthumously, or at least after he has turned in his last grades.
