Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

19.3 Effects and implications of literary deviation: defamiliarization
Unit 19 Deviation
Section 4 Poetic form

We have seen that literature is a discourse that reworks the conventions and codes of the language and is potentially deviant in a range of different dimensions. This does not mean, however, that literature has nothing to say about the ordinary world we live in. On the contrary, its use of deviation allows us to see that world from unfamiliar and revealing angles (Russian Formalist critics called this effect defamiliarization). The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) wrote that ’the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922). In everyday communication we are usually content to leave intact the limits of our language and therefore of our world. Literature, by contrast, extends the boundaries of our taken-for-granted world and allows us to think and feel it afresh by systematically deviating from conventional linguistic practices and habitual modes of expression. Literature may be seen as a domain of linguistic experiment in how to say new things by bending the rules of the system. By subverting the commonsense bonds between utterances and their situations of use it allows us to explore new kinds of identity, forms of relationship and ways of seeing the world.