Editing Defamiliarization (section)

== Usage ==

=== In Romantic poetry ===
The technique appears in English Romantic poetry, particularly in the poetry of [[Wordsworth]], and was defined in the following way by [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]], in his ''[[Biographia Literaria]]'': "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar ... this is the character and privilege of genius."

Preceding Coleridge's formulation is that of the German Romantic poet and philosopher [[Novalis]]: "The art of estranging in a given way, making a subject strange and yet familiar and alluring, that is Romantic poetics."<ref>''Pollen And Fragments'' (1798) (Arthur Versluis translation, 1989)</ref>

=== In Russian literature ===

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."{{r|shklovskyreader|p=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 [[Nikolai Leskov|Leskov]].  Ordinary speech and literary language have thereby changed places (see the work of [[Vyacheslav Ivanov (poet)|Vyacheslav Ivanov]] and many others)."{{r|shklovskyreader|p=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."{{r|shklovskyreader|p=19}}

Narrative plots can also be defamiliarized. The Russian formalists distinguished between the [[Fabula and syuzhet|fabula]] or basic story stuff of a narrative and the [[syuzhet]] or the formation of the story stuff into a concrete [[Plot (narrative)|plot]]. For Shklovsky, the syuzhet is the fabula defamiliarized. Shklovsky cites [[Lawrence Sterne]]'s [[Tristram Shandy]] as an example of a story that is defamiliarized by unfamiliar plotting.<ref>Victor Shklovsky, "Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary" in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, 2nd ed., trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 25–57.</ref>  Sterne uses temporal displacements, digressions, and causal disruptions (e.g., placing the effects before their causes) to slow down the reader's ability to reassemble the (familiar) story. As a result, the syuzhet "makes strange" the fabula.