Dancefloor-Driven Literature: Subcultural big bangs and a new center for the aesthetic universe

Abstract

This paper sets coordinates squarely for Holleran’s ‘aesthetic center of the universe’ –venturing toward the black hole of the nightclub dancefloor. Further, it will reach out to those writers determined to capture the electronic essence of this at times alien electronic dance music culture within the rather more earth-bound parameters of the written word. How might such authors write about something so otherworldly as the nightclub scene? How might they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid, metronomic beat of electronic music? What literary techniques might they deploy to accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience? In an attempt to address these questions this paper will offer an outerspace overview of this subculture and its fictional literary output.