defamiliarization
defamiliarization, the distinctive effect achieved by literary works in disrupting our habitual perception of the world, enabling us to ‘see’ things afresh, according to the theories of some English Romantic poets and of Russian Formalism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) wrote of the ‘film of familiarity’ that blinds us to the wonders of the world, and that Wordworth's poetry aimed to remove. P. B. Shelley in his essay ‘The Defence of Poetry’ (written 1821) also claims that poetry ‘makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ by stripping ‘the veil of familiarity from the world’. In modern usage, the term corresponds to Viktor Shklovsky's use of the Russian word ostranenie (‘making strange’) in his influential essay ‘Poetry as Technique’ (1917). Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to recover for us the sensation of life which is diminished in the ‘automatized’ routine of everyday experience. He and the other Formalists set out to define the devices by which literary works achieve this effect, usually in terms of the ‘ foregrounding’ of the linguistic medium. Brecht's theory of the alienation effect in drama starts from similar grounds. See also literariness.
