Defamiliarization
Etymology
A translation of the Russian "ostranenie" (остранение, "making strange"), coined by Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Technique" (1917). He argued art exists to defeat the numbing of habit and make the stone stony again. Flagged as a coinage.
noun · /dee-fuh-mil-yuh-rih-ZAY-shuhn/
An artistic technique that presents ordinary things in strange, unfamiliar ways so we perceive them freshly.
What it names
Names what good art does to reawaken jaded perception — useful for describing why an odd metaphor or camera angle makes the world vivid again.
Example
The novel’s trick was defamiliarization — describing a telephone as if an alien had found it, until the everyday object turned uncanny.
Related idea
Compare the sublime, an overwhelming grandeur; defamiliarization works in the opposite direction, finding strangeness in the small and familiar.