IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER I set the discussion of the ready-made aspect of literary montage aside in order to focus on the perceptual dimension of film editing and photomontage/collage understood in the narrow sense. Tracking the historical application of the term “montage” in Weimar film and literary criticism in the second half of 1920s allowed me to specify the perceptual common ground on which literary montage, Dadaist photomontage/ collage, and a specific type of editing—“Russian montage”— were brought together: the experience of disruption. Although spectator/ reader-dependent, the perceptual experience of disruption saves the concept of “montage” from becoming overinflated. More specifically, the specification of this common ground bestows both necessary conceptual precision and empirical foundation to the claim that the perceptual effect of montage and the experience of modernity are alike. From the perspectives of literary criticism and theory, the perceptual experience of disruption provides one of the two necessary conditions for the identification of literary montage. Unlike in film and photomontage/collage, however, where recourse to the technological aspect (e.g., the fact of cutting) of the formal technique is sufficient to attribute the perceptual experience of disruption to a particular montage device, in the case of literary montage it is necessary to engage with the material used.

Having established the perceptual trait common to all montage, this chapter examines in detail the other key feature that the contemporary critics saw as constitutive of literary montage—its ready-made nature. I open the chapter with a theoretical discussion of the ready-made in an attempt to improve on existing accounts, particularly those by Viktor Žmegač (1987) and Hanno Möbius (2000). I argue that a truly intermedial account of ready-made cannot rest on either the notion of “nonfictionality” or that of “physical tangibility,” as commonly used phrases such as the “document” or “reality fragment” would imply. In the former case, ready-mades can be engaged fictionally as much as nonfictionally. In the latter, not all arts—literature, most important—employ physically tangible materials. And even in those arts that, like pictorial arts, do employ physically tangible material, the ready-made status hinges on a different matter. Instead, ready-mades need to be construed in functional terms as forms that are or appear to derive from a separate and preexisting source.