The Realization Of Defamiliarization In Nabokov's Lolita

The theory "defamiliarization", as a principal concept contributed by the Russian Formalist movement in the second decade of the twentieth century, was first put forward by Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky in his essay Art as Technique in 1917, the article described by Boris Eichenbaum as "a kind of manifesto of the Formalist Method."Just as implied from the name, to "defamiliarize" means to "make strange". In the essay Art as Technique Victor Shklovsky advocates that art should be taken as a special technique to "make objects unfamiliar, to make form difficult, to increase the difficulty and the length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end and must be prolonged." In Shklovsky, "Art is a way of experiencing the artfullness of an object; the object is not important." That is the gist of "defamiliarization". In Shklovsky, art should be taken as a device to counter the deadening effect of habit and convention by investing the familiar with strangeness and thereby deautomatizing perception.When the Russian Formalist movement was in full swing, Vladimir Nabokov(1899--1977), at his 19, was forced to leave his motherland for some political reason and thereby began his lifelong oversea drifting life. His unique life experience enabled him to see the world from a brand-new point of view. And his fame-established work Lolita, first published in 1955, not only brought him fame and money, but also caused great stir in literary field. Even today, still many scholars and readers are making great effort to interpret the novel from every possible method.In this treatise, based on the former formalist criticism about Lolita, an attempt will be made to elaborate how the theory "defamiliarization" is realized in Lolita by two artistic devices, parody and poetic language; how Nabokov's view of art and esthetics is reflected by these methods; and how readers' habitual perception is broken and fresh artistic perception is generated.