ESTRANGEMENT

It. Straniamento; Fr. Éloignement; Germ. Verfremdung; Span. Extrañamiento. The roots of the concept of Estrangement can be traced back to Shklovsky’s 1917 essay “Art as Device” (Boym 2017). In the essay, the Russian formalist first proposed the neologism ostranenie (estrangement), which suggests distancing, dislocation and something becoming strange (Trebeß 2006; Sutherland 2012). Solomon (2012) argued that, in Shklovsky’s view, the effect of estrangement is produced by adopting an unorthodox point of view on a given object or topic, by thinking of the world as a question, an exercise of wonder that distances the automatically recognizable and the perceptible, a perception of the world with a strained sensitivity. According to Chernavin and Yampolskaya (2019), the concept of estrangement refers to a displacement from what a certain element appears because of an estranging detail, displacing different aspects of reality from an everyday context into a reinvented framework, returning sensation to life itself. Furthermore, the device of estrangement places emphasis on deferral and cognitive ambivalence, caused by a device that breaks up the routinized forms of perception. Both the reception and the complex cultural origins of Shklovsky’s idea of estrangement, involving German Romanticism, the philosophy of Henry Bergson, Tolstoy’s poetics as well as Russian and Italian futurism, are discussed in the contemporary debate.