1. What is it?
Defamiliarization is a descriptive technique in which things that the reader usually takes for granted are presented in a way that is unusual or unfamiliar.
It is an effort to change what would appear ordinary if written in a normal manner into something extraordinary or unique.
2. How is it made?
| Change the viewpoint, such as from a person to an animal, an adult to a child, or the mental state of the viewer. | Alter the way time is viewed, such as seeing an action against the timeline of the entire universe. |
| Use highly stylised language. | Play with familiar vocabulary and word combinations. |
| Describe things that are traditionally beautiful as ugly, or mundane as exceptional, and vice versa. |
3. Examples
The atoms within the porcelain slowly compressed, So many of the molecules in this crockery were the same as those in the hand in which it was held, yet these siblings were divided by forces governed by an entire universe. Furthermore, all time of the universe was contained within them too, for these atoms had passed through a million rocks and waterways and bloodstreams. And now they were within a form practical to only species, and revered because of its aesthetics. Moreover, as the porcelain was lifted by the hand it had only just encountered, so the atoms received more energy, potential energy, ready to be released.
“I hate you!” a voice screamed. The potential energy was released.
The girl in the red jacket would one day die. Her bones would be found three thousand years later, dusted free of earth, inspected, and logged with an eight-digit code within a museum that showed primitive civilizations and their technologies. Professors would love her as a specimen.
But this laughing girl, this beautiful child, would be the most boring object to children on school trips. Oh, they would hate her, loath her, wish her remains had not survived until this Tuesday afternoon millennia in the future. Those children sent their hate three thousand years backwards in time to the girl in the red jacket. And perhaps she felt it in those bones, just inside her flesh, underneath her skin, as she played.
4. Task
Write a paragraph that defamiliarizes an everyday object or everyday scene.