Touch monkeys
Subtitle: nonsense strategies for reading twentieth-century poetry
By: Marnie Parsons.
Series: Theory/culture; Theory/culture series.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Toronto; Buffalo
Language: eng
Number of pages: 262
Subjects: American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Canadian poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Nonsense verses, English -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Logic in literature.; Poetics -- History -- 20th century.; North America -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.
Description: All too often Nonsense is relegated to the nursery. Marnie Parsons argues that, rather than being mere child's play, nonsense is a major force in poetic language. In Touch Monkeys she presents us with an original approach to a much-maligned linguistic pursuit.

Parsons distinguishes between nonsense language and Nonsense, the genre. Her major chapters work towards a vision of nonsense language as palimpsestic - as involving the overlaying of several ways of making meaning on a verbal sense system, and the consequent disruption of that system. This reading of nonsense is itself an intersection, bringing together historical and contemporary criticism of literary Nonsense and a wide range of poetic and literary theories.

Using Carroll and Lear as examples of Nonsense, Parsons provides a survey of existing Nonsense criticism in English, and then extends and elaborates nonsense in theoretical directions set by Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva, among others, and by the poetics of such writers as Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Steve McCaffery, Louis Zukofsky, and Daphne Marlatt.

Following each chapter is a close reading of work by writers as varied as Rudyard Kipling, Colleen Thibaudeau, Adrienne Rich, and Lyn Hejinian. These readings provide practical applications of nonsense theory and establish the interdependence of theory and practice. Nonsense inhabits and challenges traditional forms simultaneously; in Touch Monkeys Parsons enters into the spirit of the genre.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [237]-250) and index.