Viktor Shklovsky and Ostranenie of Art

Form, System and Structure
• The Russian Formalists and the New Critics applied themselves to linguistics in order to discover the specific nature of literary language.
• Russian theorists were deeply influenced by linguistics.
• Both Russian Formalism and New Criticism ask the question:
o What is distinctive about the way literature uses language ?
• They both regard literature as special use of language which is able to convey experiences in a fresh or novel way.
• Shklovsky argues that the devices of literature deliberately roughen the surface of language in order to gain the readers’ attention and to defamiliarize the perception which is against habitual or automatisation.
• The Russian Formalists, especially Shklovsky were not really interested in experience itself. Attention is focused not upon the extra-literary dimension of ‘defamiliarized’ perception but upon the literary process itself.
• Somewhat purely concerned with the matters of technique rather than social command.
• The Formalists believed that a true study of literature concentrates on the formal devices which are used to produce the effects of defamiliarization.
• It means to lay bare the devices themselves.
• Formalists treat the literary text as an autonomous or autotelic object.
 
VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY
Art as Technique (1917)
• Habitualization devours one’s works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.
• Art exists to make one recover the sensation of life.
• It exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.
• The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived not as they are known.
• The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end itself and must be prolonged.
• Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not so much important.
• Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways.
• Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time.
• He avoids accepted names of its parts that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar.
o Modernists and postmodernists writing type
o Breaking conventions in art writing
o Suppose any story from animal’s point of view
• The author’s purpose is to create the vision which results from the de-automatized perception.
• A work is created ‘artistically’ so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception.
• According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and in fact, it is often actually foreign.