No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Refamiliarizing Viktor Shklovsky
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2018
Extract
My title is paradoxical, possibly wrong. Refamiliarizing means reintroducing the once known but since forgotten on the assumption that familiarity fosters understanding. The logic on view inheres in the root word, “familiar”: “known to a person from long or close association.” But Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), enfant terrible of the Russian Formalists from the second decade of the twentieth century right to the end of his long life (another paradox), contests that logic. Defamiliarization, his most significant contribution to literary theory, posits that more familiarity with flogging, sex, or the custom of burying the dead—his examples, to which I will return—results in less rather than more of a sense of what they are. In a consequential opposition, Shklovsky claims we lose the ability to see what we encounter frequently; we come instead merely to recognize it by its outlines, “as though it were enveloped in a sack.” To see it again, to see it in all its particularity, requires the disorientation that arises when the familiar appears before us as precisely, if temporarily, unrecognizable. Since I aim to render strange, to remove the sack, this little essay should of course be called “Defamiliarizing Viktor Shklovsky.”
- Type
- Defamiliarizations
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018
References
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. “Commitment” (1962). In Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism. Translated by McDonagh, Francis. London: Verso, 1977: 177–95.Google Scholar
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics (1966). Translated by Ashton, E. B.. London: Routledge, 1973.Google Scholar
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1980). Translated by van Boheemen, Christine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Jephcott, Edmund and Shorter, Kingsley. London: New Left, 1979.Google Scholar
Bewes, Timothy. “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism.” differences 21, no. 3 (2010): 1–33.Google Scholar
Boym, Svetlana. “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky.” In Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, edited by Suleiman, Susan Robin, 241–62. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Edited by Jack, Ian and Inglesfield, Robert. Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). Edited by Kimbrough, Robert. New York: Norton, 1979.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (1968). Translated by Patton, Paul. London: Continuum, 1994.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Rabinow, Paul, 76–100. New York: Pantheon, 1984.Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972). Translated by Lewin, Jane E.. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Hardy, Florence Emily. The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928. 1928. Toronto: Macmillan, 1962.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.Google Scholar
Lemon, Lee T., and Reis, Marion J., eds. and trans. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “familiar (adj.).” Accessed August 24, 2018, http://www.oed.com/.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (1970). Translated by Avagyan, Shushan. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2011.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. The Hamburg Score (1928). Translated by Avagyan, Shushan. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2017.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. A Hunt for Optimism (1931). Translated by Avagyan, Shushan. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2009.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. Knight's Move (1923). Translated by Sheldon, Richard. Normal: Dalkey Archive, 2005.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Monument to a Scientific Error” (1930). Translated by Avagyan, Shushan. http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/monument-to-a-scientific-error/.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917–22 (1923). Translated by Sheldon, Richard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. The Theory of Prose. 2nd ed., 1929. Translated by Sher, Benjamin. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive, 1990.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. Third Factory (1926). Translated by Sheldon, Richard. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader. Edited and translated by Berlina, Alexandra. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. Zoo: Or, Letters Not About Love (1923). Translated by Sheldon, Richard. Normal: Dalkey Archive, 2001.Google Scholar
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution (1924). No translator. New York: Russell & Russell, 1957.Google Scholar
Vitale, Serena. Shklovsky: Witness to an Era (1979). Translated by Richards, Jamie. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2012.Google Scholar
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.Google Scholar