Richard M. Gollin is concerned with the structure and meaning of narrative films, and of other kinds 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 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: A.H. 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 New CBEL. Fulbright scholar to Oxford University, Fore Fellow, Wilson Fellow, NYSCA, ACLS, Rockefeller, and NEH grants. Courses in film, drama, Victorian literature.
Email: ffff@mail.rochester.edu
