ABSTRACT
Literary language not only highlights or foregrounds, but also it alienates or estranges (ostranenie): already noted by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. Readers must look afresh at what has become familiarized (see Viktor Shklovsky 1917). So William Blake’s poem Tyger in its imagery and rhetorical questions forces on the reader a radical and dynamic re-conceptualization of the animal. And Gerard Manly Hopkins’ poetry generally, in language and subject, makes us feel the essence of things (inscape): an apt illustration of Shklovsky’s own description of the function of literature, namely that it should reveal the ‘stoniness’ of a stone.
