Russell Banks is a novelist whose work spans the bleakest of contemporary stories (The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction) and a dazzling piece of historical recreation, Cloudsplitter, his novel recounting John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Banks’ novels turn on the understandings and misunderstandings brought by time, as characters challenge each other’s versions of the truth. Atom Egoyan’s films powerfully evoke the treachery of memory. His eerie and haunting visual style, particularly in his stunning adaptation of The Sweet Hereafter, uses our confidence in what we see to make us doubt what we know. Where Banks plays with the voices of four narrators, each undoing what came before, only to be deconstructed in turn, Egoyan, in films like Calendar, Exotica and Ararat, obsessively transforms vibrant images into memories before our eyes, moving us in and out of time, bringing the dead back and making the old young, just for a moment. 

Bringing these two geniuses of time construction together will open a new conversation about how we learn, forget and lie in time — and how history returns only to mock and mourn for us all.

The two will speak about their individual work, and then we will open a larger conversation about the particular challenges and excitement of using history as a subject for both literature and film and moving between the two media.

Organized by the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences