Refamiliarizing Viktor Shklovsky

Bibliographic Data

ID12411451
AuthorsCannon Schmitt (corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume47
Issue1
Pages187-201
Publication date2018-12-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueVictorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1060150318001444
OpenAlexW2903829374
LanguageEN
References cited19

My title is paradoxical, possibly wrong. Refamiliarizing means reintroducing the once known but since forgotten on the assumption that familiarity fosters understanding. The logic on view inheres in the root word, “familiar”: “known to a person from long or close association.” But Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), enfant terrible of the Russian Formalists from the second decade of the twentieth century right to the end of his long life (another paradox), contests that logic. Defamiliarization , his most significant contribution to literary theory, posits that more familiarity with flogging, sex, or the custom of burying the dead—his examples, to which I will return—results in less rather than more of a sense of what they are. In a consequential opposition, Shklovsky claims we lose the ability to see what we encounter frequently; we come instead merely to recognize it by its outlines, “as though it were enveloped in a sack.” To see it again, to see it in all its particularity, requires the disorientation that arises when the familiar appears before us as precisely, if temporarily, unrecognizable. Since I aim to render strange, to remove the sack, this little essay should of course be called “Defamiliarizing Viktor Shklovsky.”

Art · Defamiliarization · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Opposition (politics · Root (linguistics · Contemporary Cultural and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

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