‘Tell it Slant’: Defamiliarizing Spanish Realism

Abstract

Focusing on Spanish realism, this article argues that content-oriented critics have become overly familiar with realism, ignoring its literariness, what Emily Dickinson referred to as telling ‘all the Truth but tell it slant’, so that ‘Truth’s superb surprise’ may dazzle gradually. Shklovsky’s defamiliarization is also a way of telling it slant, revealing the inner forms of realism and making visible something that was invisible to us, the out-of-the-ordinary inside the ordinary world that in turn possesses its own special aura.