ABSTRACT
Literary language can "defamiliarize" or "make strange" ordinary objects and experiences. Literary devices draw our attention to the workings of language as language. Uri Margolin highlights this attention to specific literary strategies: Natural language is defamiliarized through figures of sound and sense and worn-out literary conventions through depriving them of their motivation, 'laying them bare,' so to speak, and parodying them. Draw attention to the literary devices the writer uses to defamiliarize the ordinary, recover lost sensations, and prolong the aesthetic experience. Scholars often extend an insight or apply an observation to another field. For example, even though Viktor Shklovsky focuses on literary texts, someone can apply Shklovsky's notion of defamiliarizing to the visual arts, architecture, film, dance, sculpture, and theater. Shklovsky encourages us to explain how a text estranges and defamiliarizes the familiar and ordinary. Shklovsky wants us to focus on how a text conveys meaning instead of merely trying to summarize what a text suggests or implies.
