Defamiliarization or ostranenie (Russian: остранение, IPA: [ɐstrɐˈnʲenʲɪjə]) is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently.
[2]: 16 Thus, defamiliarization serves as a means to force individuals to recognize artistic language: In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words and in the characteristic thought structures compounded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark – that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception.
And with defamiliarization come both the slowing down and the increased difficulty (impeding) of the process of reading and comprehending and an awareness of the artistic procedures (devices) causing them.
[4] The technique appears in English Romantic poetry, particularly in the poetry of Wordsworth, and was defined in the following way by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria: "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar ... this is the character and privilege of genius."
[6] Sterne uses temporal displacements, digressions, and causal disruptions (e.g., placing the effects before their causes) to slow down the reader's ability to reassemble the (familiar) story.
[1]: 218 The influence of Russian Formalism on twentieth-century art and culture is largely due to the literary technique of defamiliarization or 'making strange', and has also been linked to Freud's notion of the uncanny.
[8]: 250 Defamiliarization has been associated with the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose Verfremdungseffekt ("estrangement effect") was a potent element of his approach to theatre.
In fact, as Willett points out, Verfremdungseffekt is "a translation of the Russian critic Viktor Shklovskij's phrase 'Priem Ostranenija', or 'device for making strange'".
Science fiction critic Simon Spiegel, who defines defamiliarization as "the formal-rhetorical act of making the familiar strange (in Shklovsky's sense)," distinguished it from Brecht's estrangement effect.