The Encyclopaedia as Montage: in Benjamin, Bataille and Queneau

This session explores how, in the late 1920s and 1930s, a number of avant-garde writers and intellectuals experimented with encyclopedic and dictionary forms as fragmented, non-linear, and montage-like structures of thought.The session will focus on three key texts:Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–1940), with its montage of citations, fragments, and conceptual constellations around the modern urban experience.
Georges Bataille’s Critical Dictionary (1929–1930), published in Documents, which destabilises encyclopedic knowledge through disjunctive entries and materialist critique.
Raymond Queneau’s Encyclopedia of the Inexact Sciences, an encyclopedic project chronologicaling nineteenth century science that failed to lead anywhere, fragments of which were later incorporated into his novel Children of Clay (1938) after difficulties finding a publisher.Taken together, these works suggest an experimental rethinking of the encyclopedia not as a system of classification, but as a site of juxtaposition, rupture, and montage. The session will develop a theory of montage as a textual practice, tracing how fragmentary knowledge forms emerge within avant-garde writing across this period.