Presenting an ordinary thing so strangely that you actually perceive it again, instead of recognising it and moving on.
Viktor Shklovsky, 1917.
// Where it sits
Shklovsky's claim is that most of life is spent at the left-hand pole, and that this is a kind of loss.
What it really means
Viktor Shklovsky's argument, published in 1917, begins with a loss most people have never noticed.
Habit eats objects. You walk into your kitchen and do not see it. You have not looked at your own front door in years. Recognition is enormously efficient — it lets you move through a room without processing any of it — and the price is that after enough repetitions, the thing stops arriving at all. You are no longer perceiving your kitchen. You are confirming it.
His word for the remedy is ostranenie — making strange — usually rendered in English as defamiliarization or estrangement, and every translation is slightly awkward, which is why the Russian is still used.
The formulation everyone quotes, in Lemon and Reis's translation, is the clearest statement of purpose in twentieth-century criticism: art exists to make the stone stony — Benjamin Sher renders it 'to make a stone feel stony'. Not to tell you a stone is there. To restore the sensation of it — weight, cold, grain — which recognition had replaced with the single word stone.
What follows from that is a claim about difficulty that runs against most reading advice. If habit is the enemy, then making the reader work is not a flaw. A description that takes a paragraph to resolve into something familiar has held perception open for a paragraph. The delay is not an obstacle to the effect; the delay is the effect.
Which is why Shklovsky's idea outlived the school that produced it. It is not merely a technique you deploy. It is a theory of what literary form is doing — and it applies equally to a poem, a strange camera angle, an unfamiliar tense, or a painting that refuses to resolve.
And it comes with an unusually large claim underneath, which is why it still gets taught. If habit really does devour objects, then most of a life is spent not perceiving most of it — and art is one of the few reliable interruptions available.
Where it comes from
Usually rendered in English as 'defamiliarization' or 'estrangement'. The Russian is built on the root for 'strange', and the awkwardness of every English translation is part of why the Russian term is still used.
Myths & misconceptions
Defamiliarization means making something confusing.
It means making something PERCEPTIBLE. Shklovsky's argument is that habit devours objects — once you can recognise a thing, you stop seeing it. The purpose of art, in his formulation, is to make the stone STONY: to restore the sensation of a thing rather than merely its identification.
It's a technique for describing things unusually.
It is a theory of what art IS FOR. Shklovsky's own term for it is a device — priem ostraneniya, 'the device of making strange' — but in his hands the device is an account of what literary form does, not a trick to sprinkle on a description — which is why the concept survived the school that produced it.
Compare & contrast
Defamiliarization vs metaphor
A metaphor explains one thing by another, and can be absorbed instantly. Defamiliarization deliberately SLOWS perception — it lengthens the time it takes to recognise what is being described, and the delay is the point.
| // | Defamiliarization | Metaphor |
|---|---|---|
| Effect on speed | Slows it | Speeds it |
| Goal | Renewed perception | Understanding |
| Is a | Theory of art | Figure of speech |
| Named | 1917 | Antiquity |
How it connects
- Mise En Abymethe other formal device that makes you notice the work as a made thing.
- Aestheticthe older discipline this belongs to — the science of what is perceived.
Tell it apart
Questions people ask
- What is the Russian term?
- Ostranenie — built on the root for 'strange', usually rendered as 'defamiliarization' or 'estrangement'. Every English translation is slightly awkward, which is why the Russian is still used.
- What is it for?
- To restore perception. Shklovsky's argument is that habit makes objects invisible — you recognise a thing and stop seeing it — and that art exists to interrupt that, to make the stone stony again.
- Is it just describing things oddly?
- No. It is a claim about what art is FOR, not merely a technique to apply. The oddness is a means; the renewed perception is the end.