Term Papers on Shklovsky Art as Technique
In this essay, Shklovsky identifies the most powerful aspect of art to be the means by which the familiar is made unfamiliar. This forces a reappraisal of objects and events that have been deadened by one's routine exposure to them. Shklovsky then spends the majority of the essay delineating various methods and techniques by which artists can use "defamiliarization" to shock viewers/readers into a state of heightened perception and acute awareness. In this way, art can be used as a means of leading people to greater understanding and insight.
Shklovsky and Modernism
However, the eventuality that Shklovsky (writing in 1917) could not foresee was the gradual habitualization of defamiliarization, as it were. Today, the fragmented aesthetic that defines the postmodern sensibility has rendered the modern audience largely unsusceptible to the sort of jarring epiphany that Shklovsky idealizes in this essay. The many ensuing decades of sensationalistic, surrealistic modern and postmodern art, often typified by the defamiliarized, out-of-context image, have rendered contemporary audiences resistant to the transformative power that Shklovsky saw in the early works of modernism.
