Apollinaire’s Trench Journalism and the Affective Public Sphere

Abstract

This essay aims to make a critical contribution to the related fields of modernist studies and First World War studies by engaging with affect theory and print culture. It argues that material documents help us understand how an affective public sphere was created during the First World War. Print materials such as periodicals and small poetry volumes circulated between the front and the home front. They documented everyday experiences and gave expression to the affective circumstances of the war through their content and materiality. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war writings serve as a case in point. The Polish-born French poet contributed to the general, avant-garde, and soldiers’ press, bridging the traditional divide between the front and the home front. He commented on everyday life in his chronicle “La Vie anecdotique” in the Mercure de France, submitted poems to avant-garde journals from the frontline, and was involved with various trench publications. By linking affect theory with Apollinaire’s avant-garde writings, this essay shows how modernists’ responses to the war were not just ironic or romantic, but also affective. It further asks how visceral experiences were generated on and off the page, thus establishing a link between the recent material and affective turns in modernist scholarship.