On Friday 18 October at 15:00, the Department of Maltese is hosting a public lecture on campus in Msida by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, professor of Literature and Comparative Media, Utrecht University, on “I Feel Love: Self-Creation and a Pop Song.”
Comparative Literature is an academic field working with different forms and genres in various languages and media, from sonnets to sound poetry and poetic erasure works, epic to fan fictions, drama to life writings, and novels to pop songs. And yet, Comp. Lit. curricula worldwide favour one of these the most: narrative. In her lecture, Prof. Brillenburg Wurth practises more openness in approaching literature as an art of letters, studying it in specific socio-cultural and historical contexts and pluriform media settings.
She focuses on a pop song produced in the era of the Moog Synthesiser and Gay Liberation: ‘I Feel Love’ (1977) by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, with lyrics by Bellotte and Donna Summer and performed by the latter. The song became a hit as a gay anthem and initiated the electronic dance movement (EDM).
In her lecture, Prof. Brillenburg Wurth aims to uncover creativity as distributed activity (Vlad Glăveanu) through my focus on ‘letters and sounds’ in pop culture and its post war electronic composition technologies. She also aims to unpack such distributed activity also as a social, embodied activity by tracing the ‘life’ of ‘I Feel Love’ in disco clubs uniquely (though not necessarily evenly) facilitating self-creation and -expression for queer- as well as black identities in the 1970s.
Finally, she would like to interpret this activity in the light of the song’s lyrics, which offer a different take on love than most pop songs of the disco era. She reads Donna Summer’s celebration of love as—what Zen masters would call—‘continuous opening’ rather than the childlike craving for fulfilment that typifies patriarchal, racist cultures of (late) capitalism. As one of the protagonists in the series Madmen (2007-2015) remarks in its first instalment, such infantile longing and feeling is not a love that goes around; it was invented by advertising guys to sell nylon stockings.
The speaker asks what in Summer’s song appealed to Queer Liberation cultures of the 1970s. She proposes two hypotheses:
- ‘I Feel Love’ transforms capitalist constructions of love from coveted scarcity into a free circulation of abundance, always-already available; and
- Precisely this ‘decentred’ notion of love opens toward the kinds of self-creation and -expression practised and performed by queer- and black dancers in disco clubs.
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is head of Comparative Literature and co-leader of the research group on Modern and Contemporary Literature (ICON) at Utrecht University. She is a member of the New Utrecht School (Medical Science), program director of the MSc Medical Humanities, and co-founder of the interdisciplinary platform UPCE which seeks to empower creativity in primary, secondary, and higher education. She has been a member of the research committee on Literature, Arts and Media (CLAM) of the International Comparative Literature Association since 2018, and member of the editorial board of the Journal for Possibility Studies and Society since 2022.
She is the author of Musically Sublime (New York: Fordham UP, 2009) and Crazy Literature (forthcoming), and co-author of The Life of Texts. An introduction to literary studies (AUP 2019). Her inaugural address Het schrijven aan de wand: literatuur in de toekomst (The Writing on the Wall: Literature in the Future) on literature, new media and the future of writing, was held and published in 2015.
For more information, please send an email to Prof. Adrian Grima.
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