From modernism to the present, montage has been a powerful tool not just for filmmakers but for poets and theorists: a way of linking images, times, and places; of scoring rhythms, bridging media, and unsettling perception, thought, and feeling. Sergei Eisenstein developed his concept of montage by reading Milton’s Paradise Lost as a “shooting script.” Gertrude Stein’s ideas of difference and repetition in poetry were inspired by filmic approaches to time and motion, and the paratactic impulse so prevalent in later modernist and postmodern poetry regularly borrows from cinematic forms of cutting and splicing. Theorists like Mieke Bal have even suggested that montage can be a figure for understanding the nature of intermediality as such.

Montage hasn’t gone uncontested. Adorno and Tarkovsky both viewed it as a kind of coercion. In modernist studies, David Trotter has cautioned that reading for montage in literature often lapses into “argument by analogy,” ignoring medium specificity and positing unprovable connections. Meanwhile, digital media have upended how montage works and how it gets made. As early as 2002, Lev Manovich could declare that in “computer culture, montage is no longer the dominant aesthetic,” displaced by continuity, compositing, and illusions of seamlessness. Still, despite such challenges, montage remains an influential and productive trope for a wide array of writers, theorists, and filmmakers.

This seminar invites scholars in comparative literature, cinema and media studies, poetry and poetics, and related fields to share new perspectives on the history, theory, and practice of montage as an intermedial mode. We’re interested in papers that take montage as an object of study in itself, rather than treating it as a metaphor (or, alternatively, that consider why montage so often becomes a metaphor—as in Fredric Jameson’s characterization of the New Historicism as reliant on a “montage of historical attractions”). Contributors could explore questions including but not limited to:

• Why has montage been such an enduring figure for thinking about the relationship between poetry and cinema? What can montage bring to the study of poetry that it cannot bring to the study of conventional narrative?
• How have poets and experimental writers, filmmakers, and/or theorists approached montage in innovative or underexamined ways? What do these approaches reveal about montage and the ways it was conceptualized in a particular time and place?
• How is modernist montage similar to or different from more recent versions?
• What are some new forms of joining or linking in contemporary experimental poetics, arising in a moment after the rise of digital media? What do they share with older montage forms?
• How have poets and/or filmmakers from outside western Europe, the US, and Soviet Russia practiced montage?
• What are the affordances of montage for theory? Can montage provide new ways of thinking about the politics of aesthetic form?