Defamiliarization refers to a writer's taking an everyday object that we all recognize and, with a wave of his or her authorial magic wand, rendering that same object weirdly unfamiliar to us—strange even. Presto change-o, our perspective shifts and we see the object in a new way. A pretty neat magic trick.
The word defamiliarization was coined by the early 20th-century Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Technique." He argued that defamiliarization is, more or less, the point of all art. Art makes language strange, as well as the world that the language presents.
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” (Shklovsky 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. Ordinary speech and literary language have thereby changed places (see the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov and many others)” (Shklovsky 19-20).
Defamiliarization also includes the use of foreign languages within a work. At the time that Shklovsky was writing, there was a change in the use of language in both literature and everyday spoken Russian. As Shklovsky puts it: “Russian literary language, which was originally foreign to Russia, has so permeated the language of the people that it has blended with their conversation. On the other hand, literature has now begun to show a tendency towards the use of dialects and/or barbarisms” (Shklovsky 19).
The word defamiliarization was coined by the early 20th-century Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Technique." He argued that defamiliarization is, more or less, the point of all art. Art makes language strange, as well as the world that the language presents.
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” (Shklovsky 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. Ordinary speech and literary language have thereby changed places (see the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov and many others)” (Shklovsky 19-20).
Defamiliarization also includes the use of foreign languages within a work. At the time that Shklovsky was writing, there was a change in the use of language in both literature and everyday spoken Russian. As Shklovsky puts it: “Russian literary language, which was originally foreign to Russia, has so permeated the language of the people that it has blended with their conversation. On the other hand, literature has now begun to show a tendency towards the use of dialects and/or barbarisms” (Shklovsky 19).
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