What "defamiliarization" means in literature

A term you'll meet in Russian Formalism and literary theory.

Defamiliarization is the English translation of the Russian ostranenie, a term coined by the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky in his 1917 essay "Art as Device." It names the literary technique of making the familiar strange — slowing the reader's perception so they see again what habit has rendered invisible. The concept became one of the founding ideas of Russian Formalism, and through Formalism, of modern literary theory.

Shklovsky's argument

Shklovsky began with an observation about perception. In daily life, repetition makes things invisible. You stop noticing the road you walk every morning, the face of the person you live with, the weight of your own hand. Habit, Shklovsky argued, "eats" the world.

The function of art, on his account, is to fight that erosion. Art returns objects to perception by making them strange. A poem about a chair is not useful as information about chairs; it is useful as a way of seeing chairs again. The technique that accomplishes this is ostranenie — defamiliarization, "making strange."

Shklovsky's example

His central example is from Tolstoy. In the story "Kholstomer," a horse narrates. The horse describes human institutions — property, money, marriage — without the human categories that make them intelligible. The reader sees these structures as the horse sees them: arbitrary, strange, sometimes cruel. The familiar institution of private property, narrated by a creature that does not understand it, becomes visible again.

Tolstoy uses the technique constantly. The opera scene in War and Peace, narrated through Natasha's bewildered eyes, makes opera-going look ridiculous. The court scene in Resurrection, narrated by a defendant who does not follow procedure, exposes the court's theatre. In each case the writer's job is to interrupt recognition long enough for perception to return.

The techniques

Writers defamiliarize in many ways:

Estranged perspective. A narrator who does not share the reader's cultural assumptions — a child, an animal, a foreigner, a Martian.
Slowed description. Spending paragraphs on an object normally dispatched in a phrase. Robbe-Grillet's nouveau roman takes this to its limit.
Refusal of names. Describing a thing's properties without naming it, so the reader meets the thing before the category.
Unusual syntax. Sentences that make the reader slow down at every clause, refusing the fluency that produces automatic reading.
Formal disruption. Breaking with the reader's expectations of genre, line, paragraph, or chapter.

The afterlife of the idea

Defamiliarization left Russia with the émigré Formalists and the Czech Structuralists; from there it shaped the New Criticism, reader-response theory, and most subsequent thinking about how literary form actually works on perception. Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect") in theatre is a politicized version of the same idea — distancing the audience from the action so they think rather than identify.

The broader claim

Shklovsky's deeper claim is that this perception-renewal is what makes art art. Without defamiliarization, a poem about a sunset is just a slow way of saying "sunset." With it, the poem gives back something the sunset itself had stopped giving.

How to read it

When you read a passage that feels strange — strange syntax, strange perspective, strange slowness — ask whether the strangeness is incompetence or technique. If it is technique, the writer is doing defamiliarization. Ask what the device is making you see again: a body, a building, a feeling, a social arrangement. The strangeness is the work the writer is doing on your habituated eye.

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