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.
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.”
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.