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Interview with Virginia Darney

Recent and Current Areas of Interest

Literature and Women's Studies.

Recent Teaching History

Screening Genres:Westerns; Spring 1998
Screening Genres: Melodrama; Winter 1998
Screening Genres: Film Noir; Fall 1997

When Jin Darney was in the second grade, in San Luis Obispo, she went into the basement of the Carnegie Library (she wasn't allowed upstairs into the adult section) and "I just started with the A's and read all the way through the children's library and then finally they let me go upstairs because I could prove that I read everything in the children's library." Somewhere in that garden of the mind the seeds sprouted that matured into two lifelong intellectual passions: 1)stories which she came to call "narratives"and 2) analysis of the construction of narrative. A large portion of her professional work has been in autobiography, she is now interested in film, and she has done substantial work on the narratives of African women.
She recently taught a class with Caryn Cline in Film Noir, the Western and Melodrama. (one of her sidelines is an interest in how detective fiction translates in Film Noir.) When you add to this the facts that the work of Henry James is what got Jin into the analysis of narrative; her number one must-read book is Moby Dick; Kafka is the third on that list; but Harriet Beecher Stowe is a personal favorite and she reads Middlemarch annually whether she has to or not--you begin to fathom the depth (I read Moby Dick myself) of Jin Darney's literary interests. Then add Elizabeth Cady Stanton for an estimate of the latitude.

It is not surprising, then, that Jin's teaching style provides ample room for students to pursue their interests. This doesn't mean that Jin doesn't have plans of her own for the work of students. She sees her purpose as "helping students to move from saying of a novel - this doesn't make sense" to shift to the position where you say: "Hmm, this doesn't make sense, why might somebody do that?" And, she adds, "to get them out of the sense that the novel is some how inevitable and fixed, to help them see that it is a construction--it's created--out of their following that fallacy, whichever one it is, that the author is not the narrator. (That) helps them step outside the novel. oddly it's the love of those stories that makes people unable to get outside of them. So I think it's my job to help them stand outside the story, look at it as a construction, think about why it might be that way or it might be some other way. That's one thing I ask of them."

Other plans she has for her students are to learn to interrogate the narrator, learn to ask interesting questions and to try to get at the complexity--get beyond the uninteresting assertions that they like this book or don't. Another way she thinks of her work is as helping students to expect to find the pleasure in the analysis rather than in the story itself. In return, Jin expects to learn new things about the works from students. To do that she encourages discussion and resists making judgments herself about either the works or interpretations of them. She feels an additional responsibility to push good students who may be accustomed to not working very hard or students who are accustomed to working hard but not thinking very hard.

Students say of Jin that: they have learned to have confidence in their own work; have come to understand and know they can do more than they thought they could; have learned to explain their views; felt supported; and have come to recognize that it has been about learning as opposed to being about information.

Jin believes that students may need to tolerate her enthusiasms, which, she thinks, may seem a little odd to them, and perhaps her feminist interpretation, which she does not withhold.

Students interested in independent study contracts are advised to make them on a single author, issue, or school (literary). A further condition is that she knows the work or, if she doesn't, has time to read it.

Interviewer: Pete Sinclair

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Last Updated: March 15, 2007