defamiliarization: a standalone construct

The literary critic Viktor Shklovsky introduced defamiliarization in his 1917 essay Art as Technique (in Russian Iskusstvo kak priyom), coining the term ostranenie, literally "making strange," to name a core device of art. His claim was that habit makes people stop noticing familiar objects and actions, and that the purpose of art is to slow perception down and restore it, presenting an ordinary thing as if seen for the first time so the audience perceives it freshly rather than automatically recognising it. Working within Russian Formalism, the school of criticism that treated the formal techniques of a text, rather than its author or social setting, as the proper object of study, Shklovsky located what makes writing literary in this power to disrupt routine perception. Lawrence Crawford's 1984 analysis shows that ostranenie names both a process, the making strange, and its result, the reader's renewed attention, a distinction that helped the term travel well beyond its original school. As a construct, defamiliarization is distinctive in placing the effect of a work on the reader's perception, rather than the author's intentions or the content's meaning, at the centre of what makes a text art, and it remains the standard name in literary theory for the deliberate frustration of habitual perception.[1][2][3]

Unit

A literary device or technique, identified in a text by the effect it produces on the reader's perception

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified through close reading of a text's formal devices and the way they slow or renew the reader's perception of a familiar object