ostranenie Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
... ( defamiliarization or estrangement ) A central concept in Russian Formalism ’s attempt to describe and define what constitutes literaturnost (literariness). A neologism, it implies two kinds of actions: making strange, and pushing aside. Consistent with this double meaning, the concept refers to the techniques writers use to transform ordinary language into poetic language, which for the Russian Formalists is language which induces a heightened state of perception. Habit, according to the Russian Formalists, is the enemy of art, therefore to produce...
ostranenie
Viktor Shklovsky
cognitive estrangement
literaturnost
estrangement-effect
defamiliarization
defamiliarization Quick reference
The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (4 ed.)
... Defence of Poetry ( 1840 ), and of several modern formalist critics, it is a distinctive feature of literature, especially poetry, that it tears away what Shelley called the ‘veil of familiarity’ from the world, making us look at it afresh. The concept of ‘estrangement’ ( ostranenie ) developed by the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky ( 1893–1984 ) has influenced modern restatements of the...
defamiliarization Reference library
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (7 ed.)
... Defence of Poetry ( 1840 ), and of several modern formalist critics, it is a distinctive feature of literature, especially poetry, that it tears away what Shelley called the ‘veil of familiarity’ from the world, making us look at it afresh. The concept of ‘estrangement’ ( ostranenie ) developed by the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky ( 1893–1984 ) has influenced modern restatements of the...
Shklovsky, Viktor (1893–1984) Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
..., Maxim Gorky , and Leo Tolstoy , as well as several semi-autobiographical works. He is best known though for his invention of the concept of ostranenie (‘defamiliarization’ or ‘estrangement’), central to so much of the work of the Russian Formalists. A neologism, it implies two kinds of actions: making strange, and pushing aside. Shklovsky’s best-known work, which is also one of the best accounts of ostranenie available, is O teorii prozy ( 1929 ), translated as Theory of Prose ( 1990 ). Sections of it, especially the key essay ‘Art as device’, were...
defamiliarization Quick reference
A Dictionary of Media and Communication (3 ed.)
... [Russian ostranenie , ‘estrangement’] 1. Shklovsky’s formalist framing of the key function of art—we need to ‘make the familiar strange’—to look afresh at things and events which are so familiar that we no longer truly see them. The formalists favoured texts which drew attention to their constructedness and to the processes involved in their construction. As a literary technique, Shklovsky advocated the (surrealistic) practice of placing things in contexts in which they would not normally be found. See also foregrounding ; ...
cognitive estrangement Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...estrangement A concept derived by Darko Suvin from Russian Formalism ’s notion of ostranenie and Bertolt Brecht ’s closely related (but Marx inflected) notion of the estrangement-effect in his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction ( 1979 ), a structuralist attempt to distinguish the genre of science fiction writing from other forms of fiction. As Fredric Jameson points out in Archaeologies of the Future ( 2005 ), this is a rather exclusive definition, which emphasizes the rational scientific dimension of science fiction and rigorously...
Verfremdungseffekt Reference library
The Oxford Companion to German Literature (3 ed.)
..., also V-Effekt, a term deriving from Russian Formalism (ostranenie) and associated with the epic theatre ( see Episches Theater ) of B. Brecht . The technique of Verfremdung aims at giving to familiar aspects of reality the appearance of being unfamiliar in order to arouse the spectator's critical judgement. It is used in the socialist theatre of Brecht, who adopted the term in order to dissociate himself from traditional German and Chinese models employing similar techniques for different ends, as well as from Aristotelian drama as he saw...
Reception Aesthetics Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
... critics like Hans-Georg Gadamer , Jauss uses the notion of ‘horizon of expectation’ ( Erwartungshorizont ) to characterize the status quo in literature and suggests that readers respond most favourably to works whose novelty (which he defines in terms very similar to ostranenie ) challenges that status quo and thereby creates a new horizon of expectation. The rapid evolution of magical realism offers an excellent and recent case in point: the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Cien años de soledad ( 1967 ), translated as One Hundred...
literaturnost Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
... ( literariness ) The principal object of interest for Russian Formalism , the elusive quality of language use that distinguishes the poetic from the ordinary. This quality is best seen in—indeed, is produced by—what the Russian Formalists referred to as ostranenie , the process of making the already familiar seem unfamiliar or strange, thereby awakening in us a heightened state of perception. Just as people who live by the sea no longer hear the waves, Victor Shklovsky wrote, we no longer hear the words we utter, and as a consequence...
estrangement-effect Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...cultural critic Roland Barthes deployed this principal in Mythologies ( 1957 ), translated as Mythologies ( 1972 ), which is aspirited attack on everything that appears ‘natural’ in modern life inthe era of late capitalism . See also cognitive estrangement ; ostranenie . Further Reading: F. Jameson Brecht and Method ...
defamiliarization Quick reference
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (4 ed.)
... in his essay ‘The Defence of Poetry’ (written 1821 ) also claims that poetry ‘makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ by stripping ‘the veil of familiarity from the world’. In modern usage, the term corresponds to Viktor Shklovsky ’s use of the Russian word ostranenie (‘making strange’) in his influential essay ‘Poetry as Technique’ ( 1917 ). Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to recover for us the sensation of life which is diminished in the ‘automatized’ routine of everyday experience. He and the other Formalists set out to define...
Russian Formalism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...Formalists treated poetry as an autonomous form of discourse that was distinct from all other forms of discourse. They referred to this difference in qualitative terms as literaturnost (literariness) and sought to quantify (i.e. formalize) it by means of their theory of ostranenie (estrangement), which simply put is the process of making the already familiar seem unfamiliar or strange, thereby awakening in us a heightened state of perception. Russian Formalism is a generic term that covers the work of at least two major groups of researchers based in...
Russian Formalism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Film Studies (2 ed.)
...in Czechoslovakia. Its concern is to identify the distinctive qualities of literary, as opposed to ordinary, language and to delineate the formal and technical aspects of literature—the devices —through which ‘literariness’ is achieved: these include defamiliarization ( ostranenie , or making strange). Russian Formalism has had an important influence in semiotics , neoformalism , structuralism , and other branches of film theory devoted to uncovering the ‘filmness’ of film, or what makes a film a film and nothing else ( see medium specificity ). It...
Micropoetries Reference library
M. Damon
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4 ed.)
...late 1990s, the term reflects the democratization of poetry and poetry scholarship in the United States. The poetic nature of micropoetries inheres as much in the critical intervention as in the artifact itself. Micropoetry scholarship draws on the Rus. formalist principle of ostranenie or defamiliarization , as an index of poetic lang. but, in accordance with insights from Rus. sociolinguists of the 1920s and Brit. cultural studies scholars of the 1970s and 1980s, aims to broaden the nature of this effect; it is also indebted to Walter Benjamin ’s method...
