To Shklovski, working on form was on the contrary a way to avoid clichés, to find out ways to represent that bring back the original strangeness of things & to bring us back to our perception of it :
"Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war....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."
Trevor Pateman, the article's author, gives a few examples of Shklovski's deadpan rendition of the Russian Civil War such as this one :
"Meanwhile, famine stalked the land.
It had already become commonplace to see people dying in the street.
People were fighting over the garbage thrown out of the headquarters mess hall.
At dinnertime, hungry children gathered in our compound.
One morning when I got up and opened the street door, something soft fell to the side. I stooped down and looked
Someone had left a dead baby at my door.
I think it was a complaint."
And here's how Pateman comments this formalism :
"On a visit to the Soviet Union, the young Bertolt Brecht picked up the idea of defamiliarization and used it in his own theory and practice of the 'alienation' or 'estrangement effect' (Verfremdungseffekt) - a theory which also did not stop him writing wonderful and moving plays, in which ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary situtations and extraordinary people in ordinary ones. Sometimes, we are told that Brecht's dramatic practice fails to realise the dramatic theories set out in works like The Messingkauf Dialogues - and thank goodness. But it might be more accurate to say that Brecht's formalism, like Shklovsky's, is not aimed against the artist's or the audience's engagement with central human concerns, but rather against those ways of working which allow and encourage a too-easy, over-familiar emotional engagement in which we are not required to think and feel afresh about what we are shown. Devices which impede the automatic, the easy, the conventional response are not aimed against feeling, but rather in favour of something better, which I will risk calling, authentic feeling."
I worked in journalism for some time, and I thought that Shklovski's theory was so important. If you write your article like any other, the story look like any other. You betray the life of the story and the trust people showed talking to you. You have to be careful to form for the sake of not betraying the gist of what you want to communicate.
I happen to have read your serie on irony yesterday and I thought about this article. Irony *is* a way of avoiding a too direct, too earnest, fake engagement with things. The difference between the "good" irony and the "bad" irony may be in the irony that forces you to stop and to think afresh about things, and the one with is just another automatism.
Are you familiar with Russian formalism and with Viktor Shklovski, John ?
Here is a great article that compares Clive Bell's purely aesthetic view of formalism ("art for art") to Shklovski's (an inspiration to Brecht) : https://web.archive.org/web/20070218022723/https://www.selectedworks.co.uk/formalism.html
To Shklovski, working on form was on the contrary a way to avoid clichés, to find out ways to represent that bring back the original strangeness of things & to bring us back to our perception of it :
"Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war....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."
Trevor Pateman, the article's author, gives a few examples of Shklovski's deadpan rendition of the Russian Civil War such as this one :
"Meanwhile, famine stalked the land.
It had already become commonplace to see people dying in the street.
People were fighting over the garbage thrown out of the headquarters mess hall.
At dinnertime, hungry children gathered in our compound.
One morning when I got up and opened the street door, something soft fell to the side. I stooped down and looked
Someone had left a dead baby at my door.
I think it was a complaint."
And here's how Pateman comments this formalism :
"On a visit to the Soviet Union, the young Bertolt Brecht picked up the idea of defamiliarization and used it in his own theory and practice of the 'alienation' or 'estrangement effect' (Verfremdungseffekt) - a theory which also did not stop him writing wonderful and moving plays, in which ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary situtations and extraordinary people in ordinary ones. Sometimes, we are told that Brecht's dramatic practice fails to realise the dramatic theories set out in works like The Messingkauf Dialogues - and thank goodness. But it might be more accurate to say that Brecht's formalism, like Shklovsky's, is not aimed against the artist's or the audience's engagement with central human concerns, but rather against those ways of working which allow and encourage a too-easy, over-familiar emotional engagement in which we are not required to think and feel afresh about what we are shown. Devices which impede the automatic, the easy, the conventional response are not aimed against feeling, but rather in favour of something better, which I will risk calling, authentic feeling."
I worked in journalism for some time, and I thought that Shklovski's theory was so important. If you write your article like any other, the story look like any other. You betray the life of the story and the trust people showed talking to you. You have to be careful to form for the sake of not betraying the gist of what you want to communicate.
I happen to have read your serie on irony yesterday and I thought about this article. Irony *is* a way of avoiding a too direct, too earnest, fake engagement with things. The difference between the "good" irony and the "bad" irony may be in the irony that forces you to stop and to think afresh about things, and the one with is just another automatism.
I know the name but not very much else! thank you