Defamiliarization: How Writers Turn Familiar Objects into Something Strange and Wonderful

There seems to be a point where an object, concept, or any kind of subject gains a conventional way of how it is viewed, described, and understood. The sky is blue, old people are wrinkled, and war is chaos.

But what if these things were suddenly presented to you in a different way? This is called defamiliarization, an artistic technique that writers have used to give fresh experiences despite using the familiar and ordinary.

What is Defamiliarization?

Defamiliarization is a method where you portray common objects in diverse and unexpected ways. It is meant to break your readers away from their ingrained and routinized perception of the world.

For example, the human perspective is the default point of view in the majority of human literature. However, many writers have also written perspectives from non-human characters to elevate their prose.

Imagine reading a passage like A tapestry hung across the old oak’s boughs, dew glistening on its threads. The patterns are cleverly woven, enticing victims to its embrace. 

You wouldn’t think of a spider’s web as a tapestry, but the imagery makes sense despite being different from the usual. Now the web isn’t just a web, but something more.

By defamiliarizing the object, you can force your audience into questioning their views of the world, giving them a much more complex opinion and a greater appreciation of the thing being defamiliarized.

The Purpose of Defamiliarization

Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (who coined the word defamiliarization), argues in his essay, Art as Technique, that defamiliarization is ultimately the point of all art. Art destabilizes your internalized perception of reality, leading you to question it and, as a result, redefine it. 

He argues that “Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”

You are then responsible for bringing that sense of life back to your reader. You render the world unfamiliar to them so that they can experience it anew. 

This is why literature is always pushing against its boundaries. Repeated enough, what is unfamiliar eventually becomes familiar. You are then forced to find new ways to defamiliarize it.

Examples of Defamiliarization

Here are some works that demonstrate defamiliarization. Most of these utilize unusual or unexpected language, changes in point of view, varying narrative structures, and unfamiliar descriptions to jolt readers from their expectations and make them think more deeply about the text.

1. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Here, the human protagonist wakes up one morning to find themselves suddenly turned into a giant insect. Kafka defamiliarizes the concept of humanity by presenting a character whose thoughts and emotions are human but contained within a grotesque, inhuman form.

2. Mullholland Drive

An aspiring actress befriends an amnesiac woman. They team up to navigate the complex and mysterious world of Hollywood. But unlike the usual, linearly structured Hollywood plot, the movie is played out in a fractured, nonlinear manner.

Not only does it challenge expectations on how a movie is structured, but it also forces its audience to think more deeply about each scene and dialogue.

3. Ulysses by James Joyce

This novel follows the events of a single day in the life of three characters as they spend it in Dublin, Ireland. Joyce utilizes a complex narrative structure, parallels with Homer’s Odyssey, stream-of-consciousness writing, and linguistic experimentation to defamiliarize not only the processes of writing and reading but language itself.

4. l(a by E.E. Cummings

l(a is a poem composed of a single sentence, if it can even be called that. It is arranged vertically in groups of one to five letters, that when laid out horizontally, read as l(a leaf falls)oneliness.

E.E. Cummings likes to play with syntax, punctuation, and form in his works, defamiliarizing the reader’s perception of what a poem should look like. l(a is one of the more extreme examples of this.

5. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Two bedraggled men meet by a leafless tree, engaging in a variety of discussions while waiting for the title character, who never arrives.

This play defamiliarizes the audience with the conventions of storytelling by presenting to them a narrative that is static, circular, and absurd. Godot never arrives, the plot never progresses, and the audience is forced to pay more attention to the random dialogue and encounters that do happen.

6. Kholstomer by Leo Tolstoy

An old horse speaks to his herd about the troubled life he led. Because the narrator is a horse and the story is seen from its perspective, the world becomes unfamiliar to a human audience.

In a nutshell

The goal of defamiliarization is to render an object strange and unfamiliar so that the reader is forced to look at it in a different way. This transforms the object from something ordinary into something artistic. 

By utilizing defamiliarization, writers are able to illustrate how art and reality intersect. They’re able to pack in more into their text, giving readers the opportunity to find more meaning and think more critically about literature.

What do you think about defamiliarization? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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