On Friday 18 October 2024, the Department of Maltese in the Faculty of Arts, hosted a public lecture by Prof. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Prof. of Literature and Comparative Media and head of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, on “I Feel Love: Donna Summer, Disco, and Self-Creation.” Her audience included first-year students of Maltese taking studying “L-Idea tal-Letteratura,” but also students and colleagues from Arabic, English, History, and Public Policy, the Junior College, and the International School for Foundation Studies.

Taking her lead from the book The Life of Texts, she co-authored with Prof. Ann Rigney (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), the speaker started off by attempting to answer the fundamental question: What is literature? The speaker then asked whether literature could be a pop song, and whether “a song of love” like “I Feel Love” (1977) by Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte can be seen as literature. The song became a hit as a gay anthem and initiated the electronic dance movement (EDM). She then asked how we are meant to approach this song as a work of literature. “Every framework will bring to light different dimensions or even make it into a different 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. Yet Comp Lit curricula worldwide favour one of these the most: narrative. In her lecture, Prof. Brillenburg Wurth practised more openness in approaching literature as an art of letters, studying it in specific socio-cultural and historical contexts and pluriform media settings.

In her lecture, Prof. Brillenburg Wurth spoke of creativity as distributed activity (Vlad Glăveanu) through her focus on ‘letters and sounds’ in pop culture and its postwar electronic composition technologies. She also unpacked such distributed activity 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.

She concluded her lecture by interpreting 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 read Donna Summer’s celebration of love as—what Zen masters would call—‘continuous opening’ rather than the childlike craving for fulfillment that typifies patriarchal, racist cultures of (late) capitalism.

Prof. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth proposed two hypotheses to explain the appeal of Summer’s song to Queer Liberation cultures of the 1970s: that “I Feel Love’ transforms capitalist constructions of love from coveted scarcity into a free circulation of abundance, always-already available; and that precisely this ‘decentered’ notion of love opens toward the kinds of self-creation and -expression practised and performed by queer- and black dancers in disco clubs.

On Thursday 17 October, Prof. Brillenburg Wurth gave a lecture on “The Sublime and Intermediality: Music, poetics, and the visual arts” to students of Maltese Romantic poetry taught by Prof. Bernard Micallef. She started by referring to the classical text by Longinus “On the Sublime” and his idea of good writing, which suggests an experience, on the part readers, of being overpowered, transported, and their passions elevated. This led to reflections inspired by the writings of Edmund Burke on the connections between words, images, and music.

The speaker then talked about a number of artists whose work steered away from the figurative, including Alexander Cozens (‘Blot’ Landscape Composition), John Constable (Cloud Study); J.M.W. Turner (Colour Beginning and Stormy Sea with Blazing Wreck), James McNeill Whistler (Nocturne in Black and Gold), Paul K Lee (Alter Klang), and Mark Rothko (No. 61: Rust & Blue); and referred to Walter Pater’s belief that “All art continuously aspires to the condition of music.”

Prof. Brillenburg Wurth's visit is part of a collaboration between the two departments that started with a visit to Utrecht University by Prof. Adrian Grima, current head of the Department of Maltese.

Clare Azzopardi, a doctoral student of Maltese literature, has given three talks to students and staff at Utrecht University and has participated in academic seminars.

And in May 2025, Jeroen Salman, associate professor of Comparative Literature whose research interests include early modern book history, free speech, cultural history, and the history of science and popular culture, will be giving lectures to students of Maltese.