Questions: Formalist Defamiliarization (Ostranenie) and Literary Device

Question 1

Tolstoy's story 'Kholstomer' is narrated from a horse's perspective. A reader observes that this makes human customs like private property seem absurd and arbitrary. According to Russian Formalist theory, what is the narrating horse's perspective doing?

• A. It is a decorative framing device that makes the story more entertaining without affecting its meaning
• B. It defamiliarizes human social institutions by presenting them through the eyes of a non-participant, forcing renewed perception
• C. It uses symbolism to represent the oppressed peasant class in Tsarist Russia
• D. It demonstrates the empathy required to adopt a non-human perspective

Answer: (B)

The horse's perspective is a classic ostranenie device: it presents human institutions (ownership, money, social hierarchy) without taking their conceptual framework for granted, making them suddenly strange and therefore newly visible. For the Formalists, this is not decoration or symbolism — it is the mechanism by which the text produces its effect. By forcing the reader to see social arrangements through a perspective that cannot naturalize them, Tolstoy de-automatizes the reader's perception of those arrangements. The renewal of perception is not a path to the story's 'real meaning'; the renewed perception is the literary object itself.

Question 2

According to Russian Formalism, what is the relationship between literary form and literary content?

• A. Form is the vehicle; content is the message. Good form makes the content more accessible.
• B. Form and content are inseparable — the specific formal means by which a text forces perception cannot be separated from what the text produces.
• C. Content is primary; form is the stylistic choice that reflects a writer's personality.
• D. Form matters only in poetry; in prose, content determines literary value.

Answer: (B)

The Formalists' central claim is that form and content are inseparable in literature. Paraphrasing a poem — summarizing 'what it says' — destroys the literary object because what remains is just information, stripped of the specific formal means by which the poem forced you to experience that information differently. The meter, the unusual syntax, the unexpected metaphor are not decorative wrappers around extractable content; they *are* the content, insofar as the renewed, deautomatized perception is what the text produces. This is a direct challenge to content-focused criticism that treats form as incidental to meaning.

Question 3

According to Formalist theory, the literary device (priem) is inseparable from the perceptual effect it produces — you cannot remove the device and preserve the literary experience.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

True. The literary device is not incidental to the text; it is the mechanism of the text's effect. Shklovsky's claim is that literature exists to defeat habituation — to make the automatic non-automatic, to force perception rather than mere recognition. The device is what accomplishes this: the unusual syntax that slows parsing, the horse's perspective that de-naturalizes ownership, the metaphor that refuses easy visualization. If you remove the device (by paraphrasing, summarizing, or 'translating' the text into ordinary language), you have destroyed what the text actually does. What remains is no longer a literary object.

Question 4

Ostranenie (defamiliarization) is primarily about producing emotional resonance in the reader — making them feel the weight of familiar experiences more deeply.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

False. Ostranenie is fundamentally about *perception*, not emotion. Shklovsky's argument is specifically about cognitive habituation: repeated exposure makes perception automatic, and art exists to restore genuine perception — to make us actually *see* what we had stopped seeing. The effect is perceptual defamiliarization, not emotional intensification. While renewed perception may produce emotional responses, that is not the mechanism. Conflating ostranenie with emotional resonance softens the Formalists' harder claim: that literature's function is primarily perceptual-cognitive, not expressive or emotional.

Question 5

Why do Russian Formalists argue that paraphrasing a poem destroys the literary object, even if the paraphrase accurately captures the poem's 'ideas'?

Model answer: Because in literature, the formal means — the specific syntax, rhythm, sound, metaphor, and structure — are not a vehicle for separately existing content but are inseparable from what the text produces. What a poem 'produces' is a specific perceptual experience: the deautomatization of habitual perception forced by the particular formal choices of this text, in this arrangement, with these sounds. A paraphrase captures propositional content while stripping away the formal apparatus that creates the literary experience. What remains is information, not literature.

This is the practical consequence of taking ostranenie seriously as a theory. If you believe that meaning can be extracted from form and stated plainly, then paraphrase is a legitimate critical move. But if the literary object is the perceptual experience produced by the formal machinery, then paraphrase is not simplification — it is destruction of the object. This is why close reading of formal devices is not just one approach to literature but, for the Formalists, the only approach that studies what literature actually is.