Today's literary case study is – Defamiliarization 

Defamiliarization is when a writer presents something ordinary, familiar, or routinely ignored in a strange, unexpected, or fresh way so that the reader will see it differently. 

This concept is strongly associated with Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian Formalist, who argued that people become numb to familiar things because of repetition and routine.

We stop seeing things with same interest when they become very normal. Its like an automatic perception but art can disrupt it.

When a familiar view carries a different essence, it has been defamiliarized, it looks like a whole new concept to you and you begin to read deeper meaning into it.

An example is can be seen in 'Still I Rise' 

Normally, dust is associated with: being stepped on, insignificance, settling, dirt.

But Maya Angelou wrote:

“You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

That’s defamiliarization because dust was used differently from our normal expectation.

And have you noticed what happens when you match on dust? Especially forcefully? It rises. 

The more pressure you use to step on it the higher it rises in protest.

That propels you to reinterpret resilience in another way.

Defamiliarization is literature’s ability to bring normal things to a new light for us to notice them again.

It takes what your eyes have grown too used to and returns it to you in a form your mind can no longer ignore passively.

In my next post I'll defamiliarize the post I made yesterday about how my day went, let's understand the significance in a deeper way.

(Ps: I defamiliarized myself in the pic right?)

Princess Ella ⚜️