‘Discotext’ : Musico-Literary Intermediality in Dancefloor-Driven Literature

This thesis uses the ‘rave’ subculture as a route into an analysis of literary representations of a music scene. Almost as soon as this sonic subculture took hold – during the Second Summer of Love in 1988 – and the socio-political impact of the nascent rave scene became clear, it quickly appeared on the radar of journalists, filmmakers and authors, all keen to use society’s cultural preoccupations as source material for their output. Firstly defining, and then expanding, on the neologism re/presentation, the thesis questions why such cultural artefacts appear – secondary representations that orbit the subculture itself – and what function they may serve. Further focussing on the medium of literature, the thesis then defines the genre of Dancefloor-Driven Literature – stories born of the dancefloor – using new primary input from three key case study authors to analyse three separate ways writers might draw on the pulse of electronic music in their fiction, interrogating that very particular intermedial intersection between the sonic and the linguistic. The thesis explores how such authors write about something so subterranean as the nightclub scene, considers how they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid, metronomic beat of electronic music, and analyses what specifically literary techniques they deploy to accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience. The thesis describes two key functions such a literature might serve: firstly, in terms of its enculturative potential within the contemporary society into which it is published and then, almost 30 years since the Second Summer of Love, the importance this collection of texts might have, archivally. Finally, the thesis will propose a theory by which all sonic subcultures might be de decoded, not through the music, but through these secondary literary artefacts. It is there that stories of that subculture are locked, told to a silent beat