DEFAMILIARIZATION IN

LITERARY WORKS

Presenter-Maka Gogochuri
Stylistics
International Black Sea University
2019
Overview: • Term
• History
• Usage
Term: • The word defamiliarization was coined by the early
20th-century Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky in
his essay "Art as Technique.“
History: • Shklovsky opposed defamiliarization to the process of
habitualization
• In “Art as technique” the writer “describes an object as
if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it
were happening for the first time.”
Usage: • Tolstoy's Kholstomer is an example of defamiliarization
.
• Orwell’s Animal Farm is another example of
defamiliarization.
• defamiliarization can also be achieved through the use
of unique or difficult language.
• He states, "According to Aristotle, poetic language must
appear strange and wonderful; and, in fact, it is often
actually foreign: The Sumerian used by the Assyrians, the
Latin of Europe during the Middle Ages, the Arabisms of
the Persians, the Old Bulgarian of Russian literature, or
the elevated, almost literary language of folk songs"
Jonathan Swift's • Gulliver visits the land of the giant Brobdingnabian

satiric travel people

• This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our
story Gulliver's English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only
Travels because they are of our own size, and their defects
not to be seen through a magnifying glass, where we
find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest
skins look rough and course, and ill colored. (Part 2,
Chapter 1)
References: • http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/D/Defam
iliariz.htm
• https://www.shmoop.com/literature-glossary/defamili
arization.html
• https://literariness.org/2016/03/17/defamiliarization/
THANK YOU FOR YOUR
ATTENTION!