“Whatever Charms is Alien”: John Ashbery’s Everything

Abstract

If there's one thing literary critics know, it is the value of making the known thing unfamiliar. For much of the past hundred years, writers and critics have associated the cognitive value of artworks with the process of defamil iarization. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Victor Shklovsky coined the term describe how art disentangles things from cultural con ventions and symbolic systems, and restores their perceptual immediacy, a vivid sense of their materiality. To defamiliarize, Shklovsky writes, is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known.1