What is an example of Defamiliarization?
Matthew Barrera
Updated on April 04, 2026
The man in the mirror looks at him contemptuously, feeling sorry for him, laughing at his cowardice. Paul cannot stand the sight any longer, and he turns his back. Here the defamiliarization technique is focused on the mirror.
What do you understand by the term Defamiliarization?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Defamiliarization or ostranenie (Russian: остранение, IPA: [ɐstrɐˈnʲenʲɪjə]) is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently.
What is Defamiliarization according to Viktor Shklovshy?
The Russian Formalists’ concept of “Defamiliarization”, proposed by Viktor Shklovsky in his Art as Technique, refers to the literary device whereby language is used in such a way that ordinary and familiar objects are made to look different. Thus literary language is ordinary language deformed and made strange.
How do you Defamiliarize an object?
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.
How do you use Defamiliarization in a sentence?
The notions of defamiliarization and foregrounding as linguistic phenomena can help us understand the nature of literariness and how they are developed. He pushes his defamiliarization of the banal, the bland and the kitsch to a new extreme this time, allowing full reign to an excessive attention to patterns.
What is the importance of Defamiliarization in popular culture?
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia Defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение) is the artistic technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar.
What is Defamiliarization Fabula and Syuzhet?
They were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky. The fabula is “the raw material of a story”, and syuzhet is “the way a story is organized”.
What is the central idea of Viktor Shklovsky’s art as technique?
Viktor argued, Art is a technique that helps recover the sensation of life through defamiliarizing the familiar. It gives a new perception about the familiar and habitual. His basic premise is that poetic language is different from the ordinary use of language.
What is the Fabula?
FABULA AND SJUZHET: Fabula refers to the chronological sequence of events in a narrative; sjuzhet is the re-presentation of those events (through narration, metaphor, camera angles, the re-ordering of the temporal sequence, and so on).
What is plot according to formalists?
Defamiliarization in Prose fiction: The Russian Formalists stress that while ‘story’ (fabula) is merely the chronological sequence of events, the raw material awaiting the organizing hand of the writer, plot (syuzhet) is the order of presentation in the narration which is strictly literary.
Which school of literary theory is associated with the phrase to make the stones Stonier?
Prescriptive formalism is often associated with Marxism; the early Soviet critic Shlovsky argued that the function of literature was to “make the stone stonier” i.e. to use the alienating effect of challenging devices in order to avoid offering up an immediate, transparent meaning to readers so that they would have to …
What is the origin of the word “ostranenie?
Ostranenie was originally a Russian word. According to dictionary.com, it was a Russian literary critic and writer, who went by the name of Viktor Shklovsky, who first coined the term.
Why is ostranenie important to you?
On a personal level, the idea of ostranenie is important to me, because I often view life through a defamiliarized, or “ostraneneic” lens, if you will. Having the ability to view one’s own way of life as strange and fascinating can help one to have an objective viewpoint in anthropology rather than an ethnocentric one.
What is the connection between ostranenie and the uncanny?
The connection between ostranenie and the uncanny can be seen where Freud muses on the technique of literary uncanniness: “It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation.”:230
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