The Ordinary World, Seen Sideways: What Is Defamiliarization in Literature?.

What is defamiliarization in literature? It is the art of making an ordinary thing seem strange enough to be noticed again. A writer describes a familiar object, action or custom as though neither writer nor reader has agreed in advance what it means. A staircase becomes a machine for persuading the body upward. A theatre audience becomes a collection of people sitting in darkness while strangers imitate grief under artificial light. A coin, viewed by someone who does not understand money, becomes a small disc that can somehow command food, labour or obedience.

The effect can be comic, lyrical, disturbing or politically sharp. Its purpose is not simply to make prose eccentric. Familiarity is efficient: it lets us recognise a chair, a marriage ceremony or a daily commute without examining every detail. Literature can interrupt that efficiency. By slowing recognition, it restores sensation—and sometimes reveals how much habit has hidden.

What is defamiliarization in literature?

Defamiliarization is a literary technique that presents something familiar from an unfamiliar angle, so that readers perceive rather than merely recognise it. The subject itself may remain perfectly ordinary. What changes is the route by which language leads us toward it.

Imagine that a novel says, “She opened the umbrella.” The sentence delivers its information almost invisibly. Now imagine that the same action is seen by a child who has never encountered an umbrella: a folded black object suddenly grows ribs and a circular roof, and an adult carries a private patch of night into the rain. The second version delays the name. In that delay, the umbrella regains shape, mechanism and oddity.

Defamiliarization does not replace the real world with a stranger one. It removes the label from the real world long enough for us to look again.

This makes it useful far beyond description. A writer can defamiliarize etiquette, work, law, gender, class, war or ownership by showing a social practice to someone who does not accept its usual explanation. The technique asks a deceptively simple question: if we had not learned to call this normal, what would it look like?

Viktor Shklovsky and the idea of “making strange”

The concept is closely associated with the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky. In his 1917 essay commonly translated as “Art as Technique” or “Art as Device,” he argued that habitual perception becomes automatic. We move through daily life using mental shorthand; repeated things become so familiar that, in an important sense, we cease to see them.

For Shklovsky, art resists that automatic recognition. It complicates form, lengthens perception and returns the “stoniness” to the stone. The phrase often used in English is making strange, while the Russian term ostranenie carries the sense of estranging or rendering unfamiliar. The point is not that difficulty is automatically valuable. The point is that artistic form can make perception an event rather than a reflex.

This is why defamiliarization belongs beside, but is not identical to, the Journal’s discussion of literary realism. Realism often seems to promise the recognisable world: streets, rooms, incomes, meals, gestures. Yet its most vivid passages frequently renew that world by selecting an unexpected detail or refusing a conventional description. The everyday becomes more, not less, real when habit loosens its grip.

How defamiliarization works: five changes of angle

1. Withholding the ordinary name

Naming is useful, but it can end attention. Instead of writing “a clock,” a narrator may describe two hands chasing one another around a numbered face. Instead of “snow,” a character may see cold fragments filling the air and erasing the border between road and field. The reader must assemble the object before naming it.

2. Changing the observer

A child, animal, traveller, ghost, machine or visitor from another culture can see what an experienced insider overlooks. The power of this device depends on precision. A nonhuman observer should not merely substitute cute vocabulary; its senses, needs and categories should reorganise the scene. A dog experiences a drawing room through scent and territory, not through upholstery styles.

A changed observer can also expose institutions. To someone outside a custom, a courtroom, classroom or dinner party may look like an elaborate choreography of permission: who may speak, where bodies are placed, which objects confer authority, and what happens when a person breaks sequence.

3. Describing the effect before the cause

Writers can reverse our usual order of understanding. We hear a rhythm in the walls before learning it is a train. We see faces turn toward a glowing rectangle before anyone calls it a phone. By postponing explanation, the prose lets sensation arrive before category.

This technique can overlap with an unreliable narrator, but the two are not the same. An unreliable narrator gives us reasons to question an account. A defamiliarizing narrator may describe the world with complete accuracy; the strangeness comes from perspective, not falsehood.

4. Taking a metaphor unusually seriously

Dead metaphors are figures we scarcely notice: the foot of a mountain, the face of a clock, the mouth of a river. A writer can revive one by following its implications. If a city has arteries, what counts as its blood, its blockage, its wound? If a household is a machine, who supplies the energy and who receives the product?

Here defamiliarization may create a recurring literary motif. Each return changes the image until a casual figure becomes a way of thinking. The technique is not decoration laid over meaning; it can be the process by which meaning develops.

5. Altering scale or speed

A scene may become strange when narrated too slowly or viewed from too far away. At ordinary speed, tying a shoelace is one action. Slowed down, it is a sequence of tensions, loops and practiced movements performed without conscious instruction. Viewed from a great height, a procession may lose its ceremonial dignity and become a line of coloured bodies following a box.

Changes of scale can be ethically revealing, but they are not neutral. Distance may expose a pattern, or it may erase individual suffering. Close attention may honour a small thing, or turn pain into spectacle. Good reading asks not only what has been made strange, but who gains authority through the new view.

Defamiliarization examples in fiction and poetry

One of Shklovsky’s celebrated examples comes from Leo Tolstoy, whose fiction repeatedly describes accepted practices as if they had not already been justified by custom. In “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse,” ideas of property and ownership are refracted through a horse’s consciousness. The animal can understand being fed, harnessed or beaten, but the claim that one creature “owns” another—or that someone owns land never visited—appears linguistically and morally peculiar.

Tolstoy also makes social rituals visible by breaking them into physical acts. What polite convention presents as natural becomes a sequence of bodies, costumes, noises and rules. The effect is not fantasy. Nothing supernatural has happened. The ordinary has simply lost its protective caption.

Jonathan Swift often works through a related strategy. Gulliver’s Travels changes scale, culture and point of view until European assumptions look provincial. Political honour, warfare and bodily pride shrink or swell according to the society judging them. The technique supports satire because it prevents the reader’s own customs from remaining the invisible standard.

Franz Kafka’s fiction offers a darker version. In “The Metamorphosis,” an impossible transformation is narrated amid alarmingly practical concerns: work schedules, locked doors, family income. The monstrous becomes administrative while ordinary employment begins to look monstrous. The calmness of the narration does not domesticate the event; it estranges the supposedly normal world surrounding it.

In poetry, familiar language can be renewed through syntax, image and sound. Emily Dickinson’s compressed grammar and surprising comparisons often interrupt easy recognition. A natural event, emotion or idea arrives not as a settled subject but as a problem in perception. Defamiliarization in poetry may occur in a single turn of phrase: an expected adjective is refused, a sentence crosses a line break at the wrong moment, or an abstraction receives an exact and unsettling body.

Modernist writing extends the method into consciousness itself. A familiar city can be rebuilt from fragments of sensation, memory and overheard speech. Readers interested in how prose follows mental movement can continue with our guide to stream of consciousness. The techniques differ, but both can dismantle the smooth, retrospective order by which experience is usually reported.

What defamiliarization is not

• It is not merely unusual wording. A decorative synonym can sound odd without changing perception. Defamiliarization reorganises the reader’s encounter with its subject.
• It is not the same as fantasy. A dragon may be described conventionally; a kitchen spoon may be defamiliarized. The technique concerns presentation, not whether the subject exists.
• It is not obscurity for its own sake. Productive difficulty eventually rewards attention with a sharpened relation to the subject. Mere confusion may offer no such return.
• It is not always a narrator’s mistake. The unfamiliar account may be more exact than the habitual label it replaces.
• It is not automatically critical. A strange perspective can challenge power, but it can also exoticise people or pretend that an outsider’s gaze is innocent. Readers should ask what assumptions the new angle carries.

Nor should every striking image be forced into the category. A metaphor, symbol or descriptive flourish may have other work to do. Defamiliarization is most useful as a name for an effect: our recognition is delayed, and in the interval the thing becomes perceptible in a new way.

How to identify defamiliarization: five questions

1. What ordinary name has been delayed? Try to identify the familiar object or practice beneath the description. Notice how long the text keeps you from naming it.
2. Whose perspective makes it strange? Consider age, species, culture, knowledge, location and emotional state. What can this observer perceive, and what categories are unavailable?
3. Which details return to view? Look for texture, sound, labour, bodily movement, hidden rules or inequalities that the ordinary label suppresses.
4. What changes when recognition arrives? Do you laugh, recoil, admire, or question a social arrangement? The emotional turn often reveals the technique’s purpose.
5. Does the new view clarify or distort? Defamiliarization is a device, not a guarantee of truth. Compare perspectives rather than assuming that the strangest account is the wisest.

It can help to read the passage twice. On the first reading, allow the description to delay you. On the second, mark where you recognised the subject and which clues produced that recognition. If the story is nested inside another account, our guide to the frame narrative can help distinguish strangeness created by perspective from uncertainty created by layers of telling.

Why making the familiar strange still matters

Contemporary life trains rapid recognition. Interfaces want to be frictionless; headlines compress events into known positions; recommendation systems predict the next familiar choice. Efficiency has real value, but literature preserves another kind of value: the deliberate interruption of certainty.

Defamiliarization can return weight to overused words. “Home,” “progress,” “natural,” “work” and “security” may appear self-explanatory until a story changes the observer or scale. Then each word reveals its machinery: who is protected, who performs the labour, whose account became normal, and what costs have been edited from view.

The technique also renews pleasure. To see rain, a room or another person without the blur of recognition is one reason readers return to literature. The best examples do not merely announce that the world is strange. They let us experience the moment in which the familiar world becomes available to thought again.

Explore more approaches to close reading in the Dot Books Journal, discover enduring works on the Fiction shelf, or browse the complete catalogue. A useful next reading experiment is simple: choose one page and circle every phrase that makes you pause before recognition. Those pauses are not obstacles around the meaning. Very often, they are where the meaning begins.