Formalist Defamiliarization (Ostranenie) and Literary Device

Core Idea

Russian Formalists developed ostranenie (defamiliarization or making strange) as a central literary device—literature works by rendering the habitual, taken-for-granted world strange or difficult, forcing readers to perceive it anew. Literary form defamiliarizes by disrupting automatic language and perception. Formal techniques (metaphor, unusual syntax, rhythm) are not decoration but essential to literature's capacity to deautomatize perception and refresh awareness.

How It's Best Learned

Identify techniques in a text that make the familiar strange: unusual word order, unexpected metaphors, formal constraints. What is estranged, and what is the effect of that estrangement on the reader's perception?

Explainer

From your prerequisite work in Russian Formalist theory, you already know the central distinction between *fabula* (story-stuff, the events in chronological order) and *syuzhet* (the artistic construction of those events into a text). You also know that the Formalists insisted on studying literature *as literature* — analyzing the formal devices that make literary language distinct from ordinary communicative language. Ostranenie is the concept that explains why those formal devices matter: they exist to defeat habituation.

Habituation is the cognitive process by which repeated exposure makes perception automatic. The first time you take a new route to work, you notice everything — the storefronts, the turns, the textures. After a hundred repetitions, you arrive without having seen anything. Language works the same way: the word "chair" was once a vivid metaphor (it comes from a French word for a bishop's seat of authority) but now it activates nothing in us — we process it and move on without perceiving. Shklovsky's argument was that art, and especially literature, exists to restore perception. It makes the chair strange again. It slows down the reading process, makes language resist automatic processing, and forces us to actually see what we had stopped seeing.

The literary device (*priem*) is the unit by which defamiliarization is accomplished. Devices include unusual syntax that slows parsing, unexpected metaphors that refuse easy visualization, formal constraints (meter, rhyme, repetition) that foreground language's sound and pattern rather than letting it disappear into transparent meaning, and changes in narrative distance or point of view that make familiar situations suddenly alien. Tolstoy was the Formalists' favorite example: in "Kholstomer" (told from a horse's perspective) or in the scene in *War and Peace* where Natasha watches an opera and keeps noticing how absurd it all looks, the familiar is rendered suddenly, productively strange. The device does not add decoration to a pre-existing content; it *is* the content, insofar as the renewed perception is itself what the text produces.

The deeper theoretical claim is that form and content are inseparable in literature. Paraphrasing a poem, or summarizing a novel's themes, loses the literary object entirely — what remains is just information, stripped of the specific formal means by which the poem or novel forced you to experience that information differently. This is a direct challenge to interpretive criticism that treats form as a vehicle for extractable meaning. For the Formalists, the experience of difficulty, strangeness, and renewed attention is not a path to meaning; it is the thing itself. Your stylistic analysis prerequisite helps here: when you identified how specific stylistic choices create specific effects, you were doing applied ostranenie analysis — tracking which devices produce which kinds of perceptual disruption and why.

A productive question to bring to any text: what has this text made strange, and what does the defamiliarization reveal? Sometimes it is an object (a pair of boots, a coffin); sometimes an institution (the military hierarchy in Tolstoy, the legal system in Kafka); sometimes language itself, when syntax or diction refuses to resolve into comfortable sense. Following that question reveals both how the text works and what it is doing to your perception — which is, for the Formalists, the same thing.