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Russian Formalists argued that literature works by making the familiar strange—by using technique (sound, rhythm, syntax) to disable automatic perception. Defamiliarization forces readers to attend to form itself rather than consuming content automatically. This method reveals how literary devices create meaning through deviation from ordinary language and perception.
Your training in close reading gives you the tools to attend carefully to a text's language — word choice, syntax, imagery, sound. The Russian Formalist movement, particularly Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay "Art as Technique," provides the theoretical explanation for *why* that attention matters. Shklovsky's central claim is that ordinary perception is governed by automatization: we stop actually seeing the things we encounter habitually. You no longer perceive your commute; you arrive without experiencing it. You no longer see the chair you sit in every day — you merely "recognize" it. Habituation collapses perception into label-and-move-on.
Literature, Shklovsky argues, exists to break automatization. The Russian Formalist term is ostranenie — usually translated as defamiliarization or estrangement. Literary technique forces readers to perceive rather than merely recognize, to slow down and actually experience the object, the sensation, or the idea as if for the first time. This is why poetry distorts syntax, why metaphor describes the familiar in unexpected terms, why rhythm and meter impose a different temporal experience than prose. Each of these devices creates a kind of friction — a resistance to automatic processing — that restores the sensation of experience rather than bypassing it.
The practical implication for close reading is this: when a text does something odd — an unusual word order, an unexpected comparison, a sound pattern that calls attention to itself — that oddity is doing work. It is slowing you down, forcing you to process the passage rather than skim it. Tolstoy famously describes a horse being flogged from the horse's literal perspective, making the familiar cruelty of it suddenly visible. Dickinson inverts syntax in ways that force grammatical re-reading. Cummings eliminates capitalization to estrange visual recognition of words. In each case, the device creates a gap between automatic recognition and genuine perception, and meaning emerges in that gap.
The Formalist framework also reorients what literary analysis is looking for. Under a purely content-focused reading, you ask: *what does this story mean?* Under a Formalist lens, you ask: *what is the form doing, and how does the technique create the effect?* This shifts attention from message (what the author wanted to say) to mechanism (how the text produces its experience in a reader). That shift is the foundation of later structuralist and New Critical approaches. Even if you move beyond pure Formalism, the habit of asking "what is the device doing here?" — rather than reaching immediately for thematic interpretation — is one of the most productive tools of literary analysis.
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