Viktor Shklovskij: Differance in Defamiliarization

Abstract

of defamiliarization oppose life to death, the vital to the fossilized, created fullness to eroded emptiness, a graphic image to effacement and the empty algebraic symbol, aesthetic perception to habitual recognition, the lively force and beauty of a at its coining to worn stereotype and dead metaphor: in 1914, he inaugurated a metaphorics and a rhetoric that traced a consistent trajectory for more than a decade of Formalist literary-critical theorizing. He began (in The Resurrection of the Word) by defending Futurist poetic experimentation and neologisms, protesting against a prevailing graveyard of and praising Futurism as an indispensable effort to induce perception of the word and, immediately beyond it, of the world and its things: Only the creation of new forms of art can restore to man sensation of the world, can resurrect things and kill pessimism.' He went on to make well-known attempts to distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former's perceptibility (oshchutimost). But Shklovskij first consolidated these views in his 1917 essay Art as Device, which can be considered his chief contribution to the first stage of Formalist analysis.2 In this essay aesthetic perception openly