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Ostranenie

ddimitrannist
11 Δεκ 2015
διαβάστηκε 2 λεπτά

Defamiliarisation or ostranenie is the artistic technique of presenting something common and familiar in an unfamiliar way. The Russian Formalists spoke first about the technique of estrangement, of "making strange". Victor Shklovsky wrote in his 1917 essay "Art as Technique":

“What we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the method of art is ostranenie.”

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, by Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television. It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside – a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs

and read about themselves – in colour, with their eyelids shut.

"A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" was written by the English poet Craig Raine on 1979. The title of the poem lends its name to the term "Martianism" or "Martian Poetry" to describe a minor movement in British poetry, in the late 1970's and early 1980's.