Defamiliarization: Perception as an Aesthetic End:With Reference to John Donne

Abstract

This study examines John Donne's style in relation to Victor Shklovsky's(1893-1984) notion of 'defamiliarization' and how this process of defamiliarization appropriately has a certain level of technical difficulty, and whether art, through this process, allows one to understand an objective. The approach to this study relies on selecting a classic and then reinterpreting it by a novel trend. The study will discuss some of the most representative of Donne's poems which manifest these stylistic maneuvers especially the conceit and other figures of speech that work as defamiliarizing agents. . Literary texts exhibit significant deviations from non-literary prose, both at the local level of phonemics and grammar, and at the global level of organization and structure. To examine these stylistic deviations and account for their psychological effects, defamiliarization is regarded as a phenomenon that is central to literary experience: it is the hallmark of literariness. Briefly, by defamiliarization one means a process during which a reader uses prototypic concepts in a context where their referents are rendered unfamiliar by various stylistic devices; the reader is required to reinterpret such referents in non-prototypic ways, or even to relocate them in a new perspective that must be created during reading.