Full Description
Almost as soon as 'club culture' took hold - during the UK's Second Summer of Love in 1988 - its sociopolitical impact became clear, with journalists, filmmakers and authors all keen to use this cultural context as source material for their texts. This book uses that electronic music subculture as a route into an analysis of these principally literary representations of a music culture: why such secondary artefacts appear and what function they serve.
The book conceives of a new literary genre to accommodate these stories born of the dancefloor - 'dancefloor-driven literature'. Using interviews with Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting (1994), alongside other dancefloor-driven authors Nicholas Blincoe and Jeff Noon as case studies, the book analyzes three separate ways writers draw on electronic dance music in their fictions, interrogating that very particular intermedial intersection between the sonic and the linguistic. It explores how such authors write about something so subterranean as the nightclub scene, and analyses what specific literary techniques they deploy to write lucidly and fluidly about the metronomic beat of electronic music and the chemical accelerant that further alters that relationship.
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Permissions
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Writing the Beat
2. Sub- vs Supraterranean Cultures
3. Revealing the Scene: The Global Roots of Subterranean Club Cultures
4. Re/presentations of EDMC in Popular Culture Media
5. Defining Dancefloor-Driven Literature
6. Case Study One: The Figurative Use of Music in the Work of Irvine Welsh
7. Case Study Two: Musical Mechanics in the Fiction of Jeff Noon
8. Case Study Three: Literary Diegesis in the Writing of Nicholas Blincoe
9. Conclusion: Towards Subterranean Systems Theory
Glossary of Terms and Theories
Notes
Bibliography
Select EDMC Discography
EDMC Filmography
Appendix I: A Catalogue of Dancefloor-Driven Literature
Index
