DEFAMILIARIZATION

DEFAMILIARIZATION (c. 1920s). One of the great modernist esthetic ideas, sometimes translated as “making strange” and other times as “estrangement,” this was coined by the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) to honor the process of disrupting conventional forms of literary presentation and thus habitual forms of literary experience—in his phrases, “to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of the perception process.”…