By Joshua Keller and Ben Nadler
Collaborative Criticism is a Rumpus column that features critical work co-written or produced by two or more people.
When we sit down to write a story, it’s hard not to hear the lyrics of an old punk song by X-Ray Spex hammering away in our heads: “I’m a cliché/ I’m a cliché/ I’m a cliché you’ve seen before.”[i] Just about every writer will recognize the sentiment—that the stories we tell are not in any way original. This concern is not new; in fact, nothing is. In the book of Ecclesiastes, Kohelet—often considered to be King Solomon—says, “There is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new?’”[ii] Unsurprisingly, and as it so often does, the bible says, “no.”
And yet the anxiety persists: the hammering reverberates, perhaps loudest, in new writers seeking their place in the world of storytelling. Every semester, undergraduate creative writing students rush to office hours to lament, with angsty sighs, that their ideas are just clichéd regurgitations of what they’ve already heard. This old concept, that old trope, the very same old premise. The very same.
With a fixation on abstract novelty, our students call to us from a crowded space of so many like tales and so much pressure to spit out some shiny new thing. Through the noise of corporate overproduction and rampant overconsumption, they hope to birth content that is decidedly brand new, general ideas that are both flashy and easy to pitch in the time it takes to ride an elevator, hopefully up. With time, we might guide them to say something that is, instead, true, personal to them and indicative of their own relationship to the world, themselves, and their craft, in whatever way that fits. However, the youthful desire to transcend everything that the world has said so far turns inevitably into a fear that one is always, already unoriginal.
While there’s no quick answer to the age-old question of originality—nor much we can say as educators to the glut of content that saturates our cultural present—one of the most effective solutions we can offer our students, and ourselves, is “defamiliarization,” a technique that changes the terms of the dilemma even as it shifts our sense of what a work of art can do. Defamiliarization (or “estrangement,” depending on the translation of the Russian “остранение,” pronounced “ostranenie”) is an approach introduced by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Device” (also translated as “Art as Technique”). Shushan Avagyan, Shklovsky’s most recent English translator, defines the term as “making the familiar strange or unrecognizable.”[iii]
As such, the work no longer relies solely on its abstract concept—and whether it is, indeed, original—instead, its task is to transform the world we know, the meaning of what we’ve already heard, and those experiences which, original or not, may pass us by unnoticed. A driver can coast along the highway for miles on autopilot, hypnotized and barely aware they are moving, but when they drift over a set of rumble strips, a physical vibration pulses through their body. They suddenly understand that they are driving a powerful machine across hard concrete, that they control a deadly mass of metal with their hands and feet. Defamiliarization is a set of literary rumble strips, a noisy way to jolt us back to the reality of our situation.
At its simplest, defamiliarization is a way to apply craft to bypass readers’ capacity to immediately recognize the concept of a depicted subject, transposing the abstract question of originality to, instead, an artist’s execution and the audience’s perception of a work: a shift away from what we write to how we write it. It estranges our preconceptions, kicks us out of the drowsy complacency of what we think we already know. Charles Baxter describes defamiliarization in terms of literal visual recognition: “It’s like that moment when, often early in the morning, perhaps in a strange house, you pass before a mirror you hadn’t known would be there. You see a glimpse of someone reflected in the mirror, and a moment passes before you recognize that that person is yourself.”[iv] For Shklovsky, that our ideas are unoriginal is not the issue. What matters instead is whether we present them in a way that, per his words, can “make the stone feel stony,”[v] producing a meaningful perception of the worlds we build, the spaces we make—what our stories can show and tell.
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Shklovsky led a tumultuous life, defined by his era. Born in St. Petersburg in 1893, he lived until the age of ninety-one, a span which included nearly the entire history of the Soviet Union. While a student at the University of St. Petersburg, he helped found OPOYAZ (“Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), a group at the heart of the Russian Formalist movement.[vi] The members of this movement had diverse perspectives but were united in their commitment to a methodical study of the literary function of language. Their work greatly influenced linguistics and literary studies in Western Europe, helping give rise to Structuralism. Shklovsky, in particular, was interested in the qualities and devices of literary prose.
After leaving the university, Shklovsky served in the Russian army during World War I and was shot in the stomach on the German front. He participated in the 1917 Russian Revolution as a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, an anti-Bolshevik faction.[vii] When the Bolsheviks consolidated power, he was forced to leave the country, spending a couple years in exile in Berlin. There, he devoted himself to writing works such as Zoo, or Letters not about Love, a collaborative, autobiographical, epistolary novel about “Russians, who live among the Germans as if in between shores.”[viii] The novelist Joshua Cohen argues that, “Of all the writers of the European 1920s, the greatest modern decade for literature, and unparalleled for writers in Russian […] Viktor Shklovsky was the most underrated.”[ix]
Shklovsky was eventually allowed back into the USSR with the support of the respected writers Vladimir Mayakovsky and Maxim Gorky. Surviving the Stalin regime on a knife’s edge, he continued to write for the next six decades. His body of work includes fiction, memoirs, film scripts, and literary criticism. The most influential of these works is his book Theory of Prose, which he first published in 1925, and revised throughout his life. Theory of Prose addresses many structural aspects of novel writing. “Art as Device” is the opening, foundational essay in this volume.
In “Art as Device,” Shklovsky decries the ways in which modern life makes us oblivious. After repeated encounters with the same things, we merely recognize them without perception, reducing everything to “prepackaged” properties; we move through the world as insensate automatons. The risk, in contemporary terms, is not just the malaise of our alienated experiences, the inanity of a late night doomscrolling session, but desensitization to ongoing horrors—police violence, mass shootings, ecological crisis—things we might superficially recognize but may not perceive in their material and systemic weight.
Through defamiliarization, art disrupts this habitualized dampening of perception by reviving our sense of lived experience. “In order to restore the sensation of life, in order to feel things,” argues Shklovsky, “…the purpose of art is to convey the sensation of an object as something visible, not as something recognizable.”[x] Accordingly, our challenge is to make an audience truly see again, as if for the first time. The question of originality recedes amidst a renewed sense of reality, a mind forced back into consciousness.
One of Shklovsky’s main examples of defamiliarization in action is the way Leo Tolstoy uses description to defamiliarize the then-common action of flogging a horse. Later, he defamiliarizes the concept of private property through a narrative perspective where “the narrator is a horse and things are perceived not from a human, but an equine point of view.” Tolstoy creatively applies craft to instigate our reconsideration of the commonplace—the violence of beating a horse, a non-anthropocentric worldview. However, as Shklovsky readily notes, “The device of estrangement is not specifically Tolstoyan,”[xi] having chosen the example of Tolstoy on account of his Russian-language readership.
Although widespread and demonstrably effective, defamiliarization is also cognitively demanding. If audiences relapse into empty recognition to the point that, as Shklovsky writes, “habitual actions become automatic,” perception, on the other hand, demands attention, imagination, and a markedly fuller consideration of the work of art. But risky though it is to make “the process of perception long and laborious,”[xii] contemporary audiences are, by all indications, game. Forms of defamiliarization proliferate across literature and media in the century since Shklovsky’s time. From the utopia built upon the plight of one neglected child in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” to the surreal historiography driving George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, numerous writers perform various Shklovskian gestures, producing a wide array of estranging effects.
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Shklovsky does not label defamiliarization by what craft elements produce its effects. However, each example tends toward techniques in the writer’s toolbox that writers already use to express character, setting, and real-world exigencies. For instance, one section of George Saunders’ story Fox 8 estranges land development through the perspective of a nonhuman narrator, characterizing the titular fox and the ramifications of humankind’s environmental impact.
While the text’s primary conceit is the perspective by which it is told, Saunders’ diction immediately confronts the reader with the perceptive challenge of understanding a fox’s take on the way humans live. Upon close examination of a new shopping mall, Fox 8 conjectures that “FoxViewCommons seemed to be a plase Yumans came to put there Kars. They wud go into the wite boxes and wate there until there Kars were ready to go home?”[xiii] The diction defamiliarizes the narration, instilling diegetic meaning in the way we read common words versus the associative and phonetic way by which the fox puts them together. For example, the word “Yuman,” repeated throughout the story, implicates any presumably human reader through the invocation of “you” in each instance, maintaining a rhetorical pressure in a story-world that otherwise normalizes nonhuman perspectives. The estranged language, in this case, is always asking us to consider the larger reality of the story, namely, what impact “you/Yuman” have on the wildlife community.
As Fox 8 ponders the aptly named FoxViewCommons, he consults dogs in parked cars for further insight, asking, simply, “How’s it going?” He describes how oftentimes the “…Dog wud either look blank at me, as if I was not even speeking Dog, or fling themself around inside there Kar, as if they wud like to brake out and do damage to me, a Fox!”[xiv] This recognizably canine behavior ranges from the zoomies to the threat that the animals pose to the narrator. But Saunders juxtaposes these actions with how one dog describes the shopping mall and its purpose.
The meditative fox recounts the dog’s response to his howdy-do: “Prety gud, how about you? It is reely hot in here. And I woslike: Frend, what is this plase? He woslike: Par King. I woslike: What is it for? At which point he took a paws to lik his but. Wile I polite lee wated. Finally he woslike: The Mawl”[xv] The animal pleasantries complement the conspicuous misattribution of agency and ownership with a recognizable butt-licking and a stranded dog in a car thrown in for good measure. The dog references being “reely hot” before referencing the parking lot as “Par King,” the diction hinting at the dominance of cars over humankind anticipated in Fox 8’s suppositions that the act of shopping entails humans’ waiting in “wite boxes” until “Kars” are ready to leave, a reversal of our presumed relationship to technology, the poor dog stuck in the heat all the while.
Additionally, the use of “Mawl” in place of “mall” situates the spelling of the word within a nonhuman register since mawl brings us closer to “maul” and “maw” and, thus, charges the word choice with meaning on two levels: a hostile action of the jaws alongside a metaphorical locus of consumption. The defamiliarization serves as a roundabout way of telling us what “you,” human/“Yuman,” do to these characters when their home is replaced with a violent, hungry mouth.
Combining the estranged diction, ironic misrecognition of everyday objects, and casual reference to expected canine behavior, the passage manages our enlivened perception of these animals as they comment upon what people do and how it affects them. With Tolstoy’s example of the whipped horse in tow, we see that to formally defamiliarize fixtures of a narrative will complicate the act of recognition, offering spaces in which to register and reflect upon the way we relate to what we might otherwise ignore. The fable’s originality no longer derives from its concept, which is recognizable enough—a talking animal moralizes on human action. Instead, what’s different (even strange) about this story is the way in which its form rewards our increased attention to the normalized yet impactful fixtures of everyday life.
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Defamiliarization is not exclusively utilized to reimagine real world contexts. It just as often contributes to the task of worldbuilding within extraordinary narrative situations that we would nonetheless consider “recognizable” at the level of tradition or trope. In Nalo Hopkinson’s “Old Habits,” ghosts stranded at a shopping mall grapple with the pitfalls of a shared limbo and a longing for the unrecoverable past.
Whether reliving their own demise each day, bearing witness to each other’s repetitive (and traumatic) moments of death, or simply interacting despite different ways of relating to the not-quite-hereafter, the ghosts elaborate recognizable tenets of haunting in uniquely engaging ways. Whereas Saunders relies heavily upon diction and alternative perspectives, Hopkinson situates our sense of smell in an extreme context, describing how exceptional it is for ghosts to catch a whiff of the life they once lived. In this case, a teenage ghost, Kitty, claims to smell the food court, a sensation so human that it evokes the hunger for food, life, and sociality out of nearby ghosts, much to Kitty’s own peril.
The diction is straightforward as Kitty says, “‘I can smell stuff. Again, I mean. Like when I was alive.’”[xvi] Despite the narrator’s tacit warnings to keep this discovery to herself, Kitty espouses a rather mundane but tantalizing list of scents: “Kitty whispers, ‘I can smell french fries. And bacon.’ She points at Mega Burger, where she’d been standing. ‘Over there. Someone’s burning bacon on the grill.’”[xvii] What is defamiliarized here is a matter of context, since the ghosts’ narrative perspective relies heavily on the fact of being dead, a ghost. Hopkinson flips the inane quality of fast food on its head, emphasizing the exceptionality of something so common to someone who can no longer eat.
This significance is not lost on the ghosts: “Black Anchor says fiercely, ‘What else? Smell something else!’” and the narrator notes the sound of this character’s speech in decidedly inhuman terms, calling it “hollow, mechanical, nothing like a sound made by air flowing over vocal chords.”[xviii] Soon the social significance of the defamiliarized act of smelling takes over when Kitty begins reporting more than just the scent of food. Hopkinson writes, “A slow smile comes to her face. ‘Somebody just went by wearing perfume. I think it’s Obsession. She smells like my mom used to.’” It’s worth noting this transition, at which the effervescent Kitty begins to recognize that her scent-sensing draws a crowd—it is only as she registers reactions from her phantom peers that she emphasizes perfume, reminiscences about her mother, crafting a familial appeal that would strike at the heart of any lonely specter who might also hunger for relationship.
The narrator moans, “Oh, god. She’s really doing it. She’s smelling the scent trails of the living people all around us in this mall,” acknowledging the way scent here connotes the threshold between life and death, past and present, contrasting how Black Anchor “chews daily over the gristle of a long ago memory” whereas “Kitty took a whiff of someone warm and alive as she walked past…just this second.”[xix] She juxtaposes Black Anchor’s futile desire for the “memory” of her life and Kitty, smelling a markedly immediate present before an audience of the dead whose nostalgia, in turn, consumes her. By the end of the scene, the growing crowd pantomimes sniffing, begs Kitty for more, and, when they withdraw, she is gone.
The symbolic content of this passage is multifaceted. For the teenaged Kitty, who died young and by accident in the midst of socializing, the act of smelling was both a welcome sense of what was while, at present, a means by which to connect to her phantom peers. That the estranged act of smelling lends Kitty a vivacity for which they snuff her out is significant; a young woman who died too young now dies too young, again. Hopkinson relies on the social dimensions of smell to register a shared state of deprivation, defamiliarizing a recognizable sense to strike the reader, at their bodily core, with the reality of being a ghost—all through a situation the rest of us might try well to avoid—food courts, junk food, and boomer perfume.
The purposeful defamiliarization of mundane experience is a fairly widespread method of emphasizing difference. In her short story “Vampires in the Lemon Grove“[xx], Karen Russell takes the trope of vampiric thirst and forces us to experience its extremity through a long list of beverages that fail to quench like blood; Ben Marcus’s novel The Flame Alphabet[xxi] sees everyday speech turned pandemic. The placing of the ordinary in extraordinary contexts both defamiliarizes the otherwise unremarkable quality of the subject while simultaneously highlighting the differences between the world we think we know and the world depicted.
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A more direct way to bring perspectival estrangement into a story is to simply write from a strange perspective. While a different character vantage is not inherently the same thing as defamiliarization, it can often open up defamiliarized, alternative facets of the material. This is especially true when perspective is shifted to that of characters whose motivation or experience diverges from POV characters. These might be what E.M. Forster called “flat characters,”[xxii] what gamers call “non-player characters.” Rewrite a scene from their perspective. Make them round. Let them play. You will be surprised at what you can see and learn. A restaurant server who happens to bend close to pour water into a glass just as a main character happens to let out an open-mouthed laugh, mid-chew, might glimpse the way the bloody muscle fiber of a slaughtered cow is pounded by an old man’s worn teeth.
One can also push beyond the human perspective and choose the POV of an animal that appears in the scene, just as Saunders did with Fox 8. The Soviet dissident Georgi Vladimov wrote his novel Faithful Ruslan from the perspective of the titular Gulag guard dog.[xxiii] The horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism are so overwhelming as to be almost impossible to process. By writing from the perspective of a guard dog, rather than a human guard or prisoner, Vladimov defamiliarized the brutal absurdity of the Soviet carceral state. The end result is not a new idea—it’s a revitalized, more conscious attention to state violence.
Further defamiliarizing effects can be achieved by moving from fauna to flora, and writing from the perspective of a plant that appears in your manuscript (even if only as an implied element of the setting). Ursula Le Guin does this in her story “Direction of the Road,” which is narrated by an oak tree standing along a highway.[xxiv] The long lifespan and limited mobility of a tree force a radically different perspective than that of a human. The lifespan is particularly important, because it enables the perception of time on a different scale than a human-narrated short story would allow. Through this unique perspective, Le Guin demonstrates the absurdity of the modern highway system in particular, and car culture in general. Ultimately, she uses this Fagaceaen perspective to force the reader to face a fatal car accident, a type of death so common and visible that we often fail to give it full consideration.
Indeed, some of the most important work that perspectival defamiliarization—or any defamiliarization—can do is resensitize us to death. Grant Morrison achieves this through a POV shift across issues of his ‘90s comic book series The Invisibles. The serial nature of comics allows us to see Morrison establish and then defamiliarize a core premise. In the first issue of the series,[xxv] the titular psychedelic superheroes liberate a character, Dane MacGowan, from a juvenile detention center, where a sinister organization performs deadly experiments on its prisoners. Naturally, the facility is well-guarded by a security force, outfitted with assault rifles, body armor, and helmets which cover their faces. In the process of rescuing Dane, the leader of the Invisibles shoots and kills four guards. This corridor shootout is par for the course for most comic books.
Issue #12 of The Invisibles,[xxvi] however, offers a different perspective on this same scene. Instead of following the Invisibles, the entire issue tells the story of a working-class man named Bobby. Its panels proceed through Bobby’s eyes as he plays war games as a boy, becomes a father to a disabled daughter, and joins the military to support his family. He fights in the 1982 Falkland War, returning home haunted by memories of combat. Despite ethical misgivings, Bobby caves to economic pressure and accepts a contract to guard a private juvenile facility. One night, Bobby is deployed to an emergency at the facility, which he hopes will lead to overtime pay. In the final moments of Bobby’s life, we see the leader of the Invisibles, King Mob, from Bobby’s perspective: the close-up of King Mob’s bizarre mask completely removed from the broader action scene. We experience Bobby’s last interior thoughts, memories of his brother and his wife, as Mob shoots him.
In Issue #1, Bobby was a faceless stormtrooper, a cog in the larger security apparatus, killed off in a few panels. This role is integral to the “teams” based logic of superhero comics, where groups of heroes fight groups of villains, and violence is normalized. In Issue #12, Bobby is a human being, who, though flawed, is not evil, but motivated by economic anxieties. His perspective radically reframes the shootout at the detention facility, defamiliarizing the heroic violence of the first issue—which we cheered on—as crazed, brutal, and sad. The evil henchman becomes a traumatized veteran, the violent showdown an overtime shift, and the heroic shootout as gleeful mass murder, all of which forces the reader to reconsider not just Morrison’s series, but superhero comics at large. Consequently, we perceive violence as violence.
This perspective defamiliarizes the common conventions of the genre. We accept violence in comic books, especially violence against villains. In the first issue, Bobby only appears in one brief, seven-panel scene, and only speaks one line. From that one line, Morrison went back and built a new perspective, and forced his readers to confront the violence anew.
***
Our students require no familiarity with Russian Formalism to practice defamiliarization. All they need are constraints which prevent them from writing from recognition. For example, students in a science fiction course might consider the following scenario: they have been selected to report on a common food—such as a Buffalo wing—to an intergalactic audience. The conceit of space aliens demanding an explanation of a human concept is accessible, and the gamified nature of the activity alleviates their anxiety over improvising “original” concepts of the perfect object, redirecting their focus to hyper-accurate, often entertaining, descriptions.
All the instructor must do during the exercise is ask for increasingly concrete specificity to help students assemble the details of their estranged representation: What is a chicken? What is sauce? What is hot? What is fry? What is it to eat? What is a mouth? Students unearth freshly bizarre descriptions, implicating larger questions of animal husbandry, food preparation, eating, digestion, the sociality of taste. The collective composition varies widely between groups; some explore the ethical implications of what we eat, others the viscerality of eating—through an empowered sense of diction and description, whether through descriptions of chickens as small flying animals who have been bred not to fly, that a “wing” is the severed appendage that once facilitated flight, cut in half to create a single serving, that the delicacy is named in honor of a small city in upstate New York. They describe the painful heat turned pleasurable for the human appendage we do not call the “tongue,” which we keep tucked inside our skulls.
As a presiding concept, defamiliarization facilitates a wide range of potential craft exercises. From the de-contextualized description of an everyday object to the temporal distortion of a physical process, writers can give life to the brick and mortar of the lived experiences that we all take for granted. Chewing a stick of gum transforms into the repeated gnashing of a synthetic blob made pliant by heat and friction, the casting of a spell eschews readymade abracadabras in favor of hushed lips murmuring, the soft glow of so many runic etchings in the earth. The greatest benefit of these exercises is that defamiliarization trains the eye toward detail over concept, personal experience and perspective over abstract novelty, conversely producing fresh takes and original descriptions the other way around.
After all, as we might have said at least once at the opening of an introductory course on horror stories, a spoon is just a spoon until scoops an eye out of a socket.
***
We offer neither defamiliarization nor its emphasis on form as an unproblematic panacea for the writer’s underlying desire for novelty. Our aim has been—as writers and teachers who seek approachable ways to teach craft—to transcribe our opening question through a strategy that is widespread, accessible, and often empowering. Defamiliarization need not be a rule to follow: Instead, it can be a call and reminder to value individual and communal perspective, experience, and openness to the plurality of ways meaning forms between the oppressive constraints of our lives and the artist’s eye that sees them. In most cases, defamiliarization indicates the clear and surprising ways that literature and media disrupt our automatic recognition of what it shows us, mediating the ways in which we relate to what’s in front of us and to ourselves and each other. By our view, the effect applies to the majority of media and text, widespread or otherwise.
Across media, creators rely on defamiliarization to evoke responses from the audience, deepen their immersion into the diegetic situation, broaden their perception of what transpires, and add weight and reality to what we already see. The Pixar film Up brings viewers to tears through a wordless montage of a couple growing old across time until one tragically succumbs to illness.[xxvii] The temporal acceleration of the montage juxtaposes the highs and lows of their relationship, the construction of their home, the loss of a child, and the subsequent oscillation between grief, recovery, and grief again. In a televised sporting event, an announcer alters time, perspective, and adds description of the ingenuity of a play that passes in the blink of an eye, a maneuver now valued beyond the points on the scoreboard. A canceled video game trailer walks players through the same haunted hallway, repeatedly, until the violent mutations in the scenery piece together a tale of domestic violence and murder.[xxviii]
Alongside its capacity to entertain, defamiliarization might function to alter audience perceptions of serious issues—the relationship between what’s written, the reading subject, and the world around them, the blurring of personal and political thresholds, systems of cultural dominance and processes of marginalization. In the short story, “Orientation,” Daniel Orozco hyperbolizes the bureaucratic monotony of a white collar office orientation to juxtapose increasingly dehumanizing experiences of the existing staff.[xxix] Ralph Ellison conveys the position of his “Invisible Man” through a wide array of defamiliarized traditions and racialized experiences, from 19th century sermons of racial uplift to microaggressions and police brutality and lynching.[xxx] While our aim here has been to introduce and elaborate the concept in its widespread, rudimentary application, there is much more to be said about its political potentials and liabilities. Suffice to say, a critical examination of defamiliarization, as concept, technique, or effect, will lead one deep into the heart of modern subjectivity and, perhaps, beyond.
In the meantime, we might end by returning briefly to our original conundrum. If there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun, then Shklovsky asks us to reshape the way by which we might see—and hear—what is implicitly familiar, even old. In a discussion of the Soviet novelist Yuri Olesha, Shklovsky described our obligation as writers: “He suddenly heard a strange noise. He asked his grandmother what it could be: it was his heartbeat. It was the first time he had heard his heart beating. And from that moment he listened to it for the rest of his life. We need to listen to our heart, without ruining it.”[xxxi] For Shklovsky, the sensuous complexity of our lives, our experiences, both real and imagined, will always be worth seeing—and seeing again—and it falls to the artist to provide the impetus for doing so, whether in terms of the world we live in or the beating of our own hearts.
Joshua Keller is a writer, scholar, and educator currently residing in
Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in venues including Barzakh, TAV,
and Gandy Dancer. He holds an MFA from Temple University and is a PhD
candidate at SUNY Albany.
Ben Nadler is a writer working between New York City and the Philadelphia area, where he teaches at Widener University. He is the author of The Sea Beach Line: A Novel and Punk in NYC’s LES, 1981-1991. His next novel is forthcoming this year from American Buffalo Books.
[i] X-Ray Spex, Germfree Adolescents, (Caroline Records, 2005).
[ii] Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, (New York: National Council of Churches, 2021), Ecclesiastes 1:9.
[iii] Shklovsky, Viktor, On the Theory of Prose, translated by Shushan Avagyan (Funk’s Grove, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2021), p. ix–x.
[iv] Charles Baxter, Burning down the House: Essays on Fiction (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999), p. 49-50.
[v] Ibdid, p. 12
[vi] Shklovsky, Viktor and Serena Vitale, Shklovsky: Witness to an Era, (Funk’s Grove, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012).
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Shklovsky, Viktor, Zoo; or, Letters Not about Love, translated by Richard Sheldon, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 67.
[ix] Cohen, Joshua, “The Formalist’s Formalist: On Viktor Shklovsky,” The Forward, https://forward.com/culture/12055/the-formalist-s-formalist-00813/
[x] Shklovsky, Viktor, On the Theory of Prose, translated by Shushan Avagyan (Funk’s Grove, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2021), p.12.
[xi] Ibid, p. 18.
[xii] Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991, p.6.
[xiii] Saunders, George, Fox 8, (New York: Random House, 2018), p. 14.
[xiv] Ibid, p. 14.
[xv] Ibid, p. 15–16.
[xvi] Hopkinson, Nalo, “Old Habits,” Uncanny Magazine, (February 25, 2018), https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/old-habits/.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] Russell, Karen, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, (London: Vintage Books, 2014).
[xxi] Marcus, Ben, The Flame Alphabet, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
[xxii] Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel (NY: Dover Publishers, 2022), p. 67.
[xxiii] Vladimov, Georgi, Faithful Ruslan, translated by Michael Glenny, (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011).
[xxiv] Le Guin, Ursula K., The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: Stories, (New York: Harper Perennial Olive, 2022), p. 269–276.
[xxv] Morrison, Grant et al, The Invisibles Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution, (New York: DC Comics, 1995).
[xxvi] Morrison, Grant et al, The Invisibles Vol 2: Apocalipstick, (New York, NY: DC Comics, 1996).
[xxvii] Up, Film, (Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar Animation Studios, 2009).
[xxviii] Kojima, Hideo and Guillermo del Toro, P.T. (Silent Hills), (Tokyo: Konami, 2014).
[xxix] Orozco, Daniel, Orientation and Other Stories, (New York, NY: Faber and Faber, 2012).
[xxx] Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, (New York: Vintage International, 1995).
[xxxi] Shklovsky, Viktor and Serena Vitale, Shklovsky: Witness to an Era, (Funk’s Grove, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012) p. 149.
