English is not my first language 🥲
I have surface level knowledge of Formalism theory in that it analyzes the form of a literary work, rather than its content, meaning, or the historical or social context in which it was produced, I think.
But I have zero idea of Defamiliarization and how it is applied to Formalism 😭
In: Other
Defamiliarization is basically taking some common concept and looking at it from a different angle, typically in a way that makes people think about that concept differently.
For instance, in the Star Trek episode *A Taste of Armageddon* the Enterprise finds a planet where two countries are waging a purely digital war; attacks and defenses are entirely simulated, and the two countries have a treaty that anyone “killed” in a simulated attack is to immediately report to a disintegration chamber to be actually killed.
Now, for most of us here, thinking about war in that sense is entirely barbaric. Which is entirely the point. Those people would have been killed if there was an actual missile launched, so why is it somehow worse if it’s a digital missile and deaths are aggregated by computer before they’re carried out?
That’s defamiliarization. It’s taking an existing concept, in this case war, and saying “But look at it this way instead”.
In terms of a relationship with formalism, there’s an argument in some circles that the content/meaning/etc can’t be fully extricated from the form it takes. It’s all part of the overall writing, and so it must all be considered as one and the same. To go off the Star Trek example from above, there’s a reason that this sort of allegory for warfare was taking place at the intersection between the space race, the cold war, and the development of computers, which is why the story took the form that it did to give the message that it did. The idea is that the two can’t be fully disconnected from each other.
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