Department of English

Richard M. Gollin is concerned with the structure and meaning of narrative films, and of other kinds of film and literature, as temporal sequences. He studies genre theory and popular film genres for the visual and dramatic codes by which films become significant textual, intertextual, and interactive filmic experiences; such study usually ends with elucidation of the social and moral dilemmas enacted in films and made comprehensible through them. Most recently he has been writing on screen comedies as literary, psychological, and ritual phenomena. Previously he was concerned with Victorian intellectual history, especially with its implications for the rhetorical strategies of the period's nonfictional prose, religious and political, and he has studied these issues in the mid-century poets, especially in Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough. In both film and literary study he looks to analyze the consequences for a work's formal structure of contradictory ideological and moral commitments.

Taught at the University of Minnesota and Colgate University. Author of A Viewer's Guide to Film Arts, Artifices, and Issues; Arthur Hugh Clough: A Descriptive Catalogue (with others); an annotated re-editing of Clough's poetry; articles on Arnold, Clough, Kipling, G.B. Shaw, Wallace Stevens, modern poetry, and film criticism. Contributor to the new CBEL. Fulbright scholar to Oxford University, Fore Fellow, and Wilson Fellow. New York State Council on the Arts, American Council of Learned Societies, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Courses in film, drama, and Victorian literature.