Aesthetic Significance Of The Defamiliarization Theory

This essay attempts to introduce Russian Formalism and the esthetic significance of the theory of defamiliarization postulated by Victor Shklovsky who is the greatest representative of Russian Formalism. Formalist theory is the first critic school that regards literature as a self-contained body and keeps the work of art itself the centre of attention, trying to reveal the nature of literature by studying the literary text itself instead of through biographical, psychological and sociological approaches. This essay starts from introducing the basic notions of Russian Formalism such as "literariness", "poetic language and prosaic language" and then moves to the key notion of "defamiliarization". Through illustrating examples in particular literary works the essay aims to reveal the esthetic feature of defamiliarization.This essay consists of three chapters.Chapter 1 makes a specific introduction about the main doctrines of Russian Formalism, mainly including six notions: literariness, definition of poetic language, form and content, plot and story, sound and meaning in verse and the relationship between literature and life.Chapter 2 aims to illustrate Shklovsky's notion of defamiliarization. Shklovsky deemed that the aim of art is to provide esthetic perception to people and perceptibility is the presupposition for art to exist. However, the law of perception is that perception tends to turn habitual and automatic, which is named "automatization" of perception by Shklovsky. In order to subvert "automatization", Shklovsky put forward the notion of "defamiliarization" which generalizes the sum total of devices making strange the form which has been familiarized by the perceiver of the object and arousing their perception to it again. In this chapter, the essay mainly studies the techniques utilized in literary works to make strange the form or the materials and illustrates how techniques of defamiliarization achieve esthetic perception through quoting some particular examples from literary...