The everyday often fades into the background of our consciousness, its details and nuances lost in the haze of habitual perception. We see a chair and recognize it as such, without truly seeing the grain of the wood, the curve of the leg, or the play of light and shadow upon its surface. This automatic, unthinking recognition, which Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky termed "alievation" or "defamiliarization," is precisely what art and literature seek to disrupt. By presenting ordinary objects, experiences, or even language in an unfamiliar light, creative works compel us to perceive them anew, to engage with them on a deeper, more conscious level. Defamiliarization, therefore, is not merely a stylistic device; it is a fundamental mode of artistic engagement that combats the numbing effects of routine and reawakens our capacity for wonder.
Shklovsky, in his seminal 1917 essay "Art as Technique," argued that art exists to help us feel the world, to make the stony stony. He observed that "the object, once having become perceived through 'art,' is not only remembered but is even seen anew." This is achieved by slowing down perception, by making the process of recognition itself an effortful, conscious act. Consider the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His use of "inscape" and "instress" aimed to capture the unique, individual essence of a thing, often through unconventional syntax and neologisms. His poem "Pied Beauty" celebrates the varied and unusual: "Glory be to God for dappled things; / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-complexioned, honey-coloured, or in full colour, but in his colour as it is." Hopkins doesn't just list colors; he describes them in ways that force the reader to pause, to break down the familiar image of a cow or a fish, and to see the particularities, the "dappled" or "stipple" patterns, that usually escape our notice. The language itself becomes an obstacle to easy comprehension, thereby enhancing the sensory experience.
Beyond poetry, defamiliarization is a potent tool in prose. Franz Kafka masterfully employed it in stories like "The Metamorphosis." Gregor Samsa waking up as a monstrous insect is the ultimate defamiliarized state. The horror and absurdity of the situation are not just plot devices; they serve to highlight the alienating conditions of Gregor's pre-transformation life. His family's initial shock, followed by their growing disgust and neglect, reflects an underlying, less extreme dehumanization that existed even when he was a traveling salesman. By exaggerating his isolation and his physical otherness, Kafka forces us to confront the ways in which modern life can render individuals invisible or burdensome, even when they appear outwardly "normal." The story’s impact stems from presenting an extreme, absurd situation that, paradoxically, illuminates familiar social dynamics.
Visual arts also employ defamiliarization to great effect. The Cubist movement, with artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, shattered the traditional perspective of Western art. Instead of presenting a single, unified view of an object, Cubists depicted subjects from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, breaking them down into geometric forms. A painting like Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) presents figures that are fragmented, angular, and jarringly confrontational. The viewer is not allowed the comfort of easily recognizable anatomy; instead, they must actively reconstruct the image, engaging with the canvas on a more analytical and perceptual level. This challenges our habitual way of seeing, forcing us to consider how we construct our understanding of form and space. Similarly, surrealist painters like René Magritte used juxtaposition and unexpected scale to defamiliarize the ordinary. His painting "The Treachery of Images" (1929), which features a pipe with the inscription "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe), directly challenges our assumption that a representation is the thing itself, forcing a contemplation of the relationship between image, language, and reality.
Ultimately, defamiliarization is a crucial artistic strategy for combating the inertia of habit. By making the familiar strange, it jolts us out of passive reception and into active engagement. Whether through linguistic innovation, narrative absurdity, or visual distortion, art that defamiliarizes compels us to see the world with fresh eyes, to appreciate the wonder and complexity that lies hidden beneath the surface of the ordinary. It reminds us that perception is not a passive recording but an active construction, and that art has the power to reshape that construction, enriching our experience of existence itself.