Notes from the Undergrad: Signature Course delves into works, life of Russell Banks

 

Dillon Welch is an undergraduate student studying violin performance at the Butler School of Music. He researched the Ransom Center’s Russell Banks archive for a class devoted to the author’s works. During the course, Banks was on campus for an event at the Ransom Center, and Welch was given the opportunity to meet Banks in person.

 

For the spring 2011 semester, as part of the new Signature Course program at The University of Texas at Austin, I took a class on the works of Russell Banks. I’d never heard of him before. But I soon got to know him through both his characters and themes. After we had thoroughly delved into the depths of Banks’s mind on the page, we got to do the same with the man. To me, this was the highlight of the course: a small group of people sitting around a table having an intimate conversation with the author that ranged from deep political questions on his frequent use of racial themes in his novels, to why his characters like to drink Canadian Club. It was an enlightening 90 minutes, for which I could scarcely stop asking questions. To know that we were learning things about Banks that few people actually knew was fascinating. We spent a semester reading close to half of his novels and several short stories. In addition, we spent time studying his archive at the Ransom Center, setting our eyes on rarely seen items. At the beginning of the semester, our professor, Evan Carton, said, “When you leave this course, you will be some of the foremost scholars on Russell Banks.” He was so right.