ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how initiatives in printing came into view in response to this curiously dual affective sensation of tedium blended with the precariousness of existence. It looks at how the notion of self became foggy and conflicted in a protracted war, as it traces the affect of boredom through the fictional archive of 1914-1918. The chapter highlights the much slower material practicalities of seeing work to print – typesetting, inking, binding, posting – and views this process as a tangible way of coping with some of the pressures particular to modern warfare. There are many ideological and aesthetic differences separating Virginia Woolf from Apollinaire. The chapter sets up a dialogue between them to underline modernism's investment in print culture, and to show that that investment need not be premised on modernity's cliched logic of speed. There are many more temporalities at work in modernist texts and contexts than its now-cliched logic of speed and immediacy proposes.
