Russian Formalist critics who pioneered literary theory in the early years of the twentieth century held that it was an essential part of the art-work to defamiliarise the conventions used in making previous art, in order to make the reader (or viewer or hearer) more conscious of the artistic processes involved , and hence to refresh our perception of the world. This was crucially the argument of Viktor Shklovsky in his seminal essay “Art as Technique” where he famously argued that “art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone . . . . Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.” The Formalist appreciation of “making strange” or defamiliarisation (in Russian…
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Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Defamiliarisation / Ostranenie". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 November 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=263, accessed 02 April 2025.]
