To illustrate what he means by defamiliarization, Shklovsky uses examples from Tolstoy, whom he cites as using the technique throughout his works: "The narrator of ' Kholstomer,' for example, is a horse, and it is the horse's point of view (rather than a person's) that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar." : 16 As a Russian Formalist, many of Shklovsky's examples use Russian authors and Russian dialects: "And currently Maxim Gorky is changing his diction from the old literary language to the new literary colloquialism of Leskov. this is the character and privilege of genius."
The technique appears in English Romantic poetry, particularly in the poetry of Wordsworth, and was defined in the following way by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria: "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar. And with defamiliarization come both the slowing down and the increased difficulty (impeding) of the process of reading and comprehending and an awareness of the artistic procedures (devices) causing them. Īccording to literary theorist Uri Margolin:ĭefamiliarization of that which is or has become familiar or taken for granted, hence automatically perceived, is the basic function of all devices. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. What we are familiar with we cease to see. It is the function of art to renew our perception. This technique is meant to be especially useful in distinguishing poetry from prose, for, as Aristotle said, "poetic language must appear strange and wonderful." : 19Īs writer Anaïs Nin discussed in her 1968 book The Novel of the Future:
A work is created "artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception. In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words and in the characteristic thought structures compounded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark – that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception.
Thus, defamiliarization serves as a means to force individuals to recognize artistic language: The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. This distinction between artistic language and everyday language, for Shklovsky, applies to all artistic forms: Prose is ordinary speech – economical, easy, proper, the goddess of prose is a goddess of the accurate, facile type, of the "direct" expression of a child." : 20 This difference is the key to the creation of art and the prevention of "over-automatization," which causes an individual to "function as though by formula." : 16 : 209 Shklovsky invented the term as a means to "distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former's perceptibility." : 209 Essentially, he is stating that poetic language is fundamentally different than the language that we use every day because it is more difficult to understand: "Poetic speech is formed speech. The term "defamiliarization" was first coined in 1917 by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Device" (alternate translation: "Art as Technique"). The concept has influenced 20th-century art and theory, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, science fiction, and philosophy additionally, it is used as a tactic by recent movements such as culture jamming.
According to the Russian formalists who coined the term, it is the central concept of art and poetry. Artistic technique of presenting common things in an unfamiliar or strange wayĭefamiliarization or ostranenie (Russian: остранение, IPA: ) is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently.
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