Father of Estrangement

Viktor Shklovsky has been referred to as the theorist who founded the literary idea of "art as defamiliarization." He was a Russian theorist who lived after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. As a theorist and writer, he had intellectual giants to compete with. While living in Russia for the early parts of his life, he was forced into exile and eventually had to flee to Berlin. After many years, he was able to return to his motherland. While this blog will predominantly focus on Shklovsky's theory of art existing in order to defamiliarize or estrange us. In fact, he refers to the purpose of art in his piece, "Art as Technique" by saying: And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.
This is a profound idea about the purpose of art. Therefore, what I hope to do on this blogsite is both accumulate certain artforms that do this in our culture, as well as critique certain aspects of those forms of art by showing how they make objects or ideas unfamiliar to us today.Prior to getting into that; however, you may be interested in learning a little bit about the man who termed the phrase. For biographical information and interesting history about his life and way of life, look here: "Viktor Shklovsky" and "Estrangement as a Lifestyle"