Arms and the Woman: The Public Intellectual in Zoe Lambert’s The War Tour

Paul March-Russell

doi:10.16995/c21.71

Abstract

This article explores Zoe Lambert’s short story collection, The War Tour (2008), in relation to the debates surrounding the public intellectual and the literary response to the War on Terror. It makes a claim for Lambert’s collection to be considered not only as the work of a public intellectual but that it also contests what it means to be an intellectual at a time of historical crisis. In dwelling upon real-life figures such as the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and the physicist Lise Meitner, Lambert also reflects upon her own position as a supporter of the Stop the War Coalition. The relationship to the public sphere is complicated by Lambert’s gender, and of the women that she writes about; a complication which not only unsettles the definition of a public intellectual but is also articulated through the oblique strategies of the short story collection.

Highlights

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This article explores Zoe Lambert’s short story collection, The War Tour (2008), in relation to the debates surrounding the public intellectual and the literary response to the War on Terror. It makes a claim for Lambert’s collection to be considered as the work of a public intellectual but that it contests what it means to be an intellectual at a time of historical crisis
In dwelling upon real-life figures such as the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and the physicist Lise Meitner, Lambert reflects upon her own position as a supporter of the Stop the War Coalition

Summary

Lambert and the Public Intellectual

The term ‘public intellectual’ was coined in the US towards the end of the 1980s during the so-called culture wars that resulted in such books as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). She has worked as a freelance teacher, offering both workshops and online courses on short fiction, and as a campaigner for the rights of refugees Despite her academic background, Lambert does not fit exclusively into the institutional role of the public intellectual but instead, like others with experience of being associate staff, sits awkwardly with the university hierarchy. In that sense, she shares the ordinariness of the intellectual, as described by Collini, and common characteristics with other members of the precariat. Lambert carves out for herself an intellectual role dissimilar to her academic and literary contemporaries

Lambert and the Literature of Terror

Reading The War Tour

Writing The War Tour