Entertainment / Literature / Defamiliarization: The literary theoretical term 'defamiliarization' is an English translation for Viktor Shklovsky's Russian term ostranenie. Shklovsky coined the phrase in 1917 in his essay 'Art as Technique.' In this artistic technique, a writer, poet, or painter takes common, everyday, or familiar objects and forces the audience to see them in an unfamiliar way or from a strange perspective. It is especially common in satire, Dadaism, postmodernism, and science fiction. Although Shklovsky coined this term to mark a distinction between poetic language and practical, communicative language, he and later critics argued it applied to all effective art, which ideally would force the viewer/reader to perceive the subject in a new way.
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