@chashale

Lately I've become obsessed with the concept of #defamiliarisation by literary theorist Viktor #Shklovsky. Make the familiar become unfamiliar, understand a thing by making it strange. Once you recognise the principle, you see it at work everywhere. So in this photograph!

#Feininger was important to me when I started snapping as a young man. His handbook was my guide for many years, his photographs served as the standard. I now see that they are exercises in defamiliarisation.

@Alan

Lots of wisdom in your post. About #humour, human #authorship, the unordinariness of the #ordinary.

"When the ordinary stops being ordinary" --- to me as a teacher, that experience is also the key to a meaningful teaching moment.

#Shklovsky and the notion of #defamiliarisation come to mind.

Defamiliarisation as the haven for authentic human authorship!

#OrdinaryNoMore

#Shklovsky on #Tolstoy:

"Things that have been experienced several times begin to be experienced in terms of recognition: a thing is in front of us, we know this, but we do not see it. This is why we cannot say anything about it. Art has different ways of de-automatizing things; in this article I would like to show one of the methods very frequently used by L. Tolstoy—the writer who…presents things the way he sees them, who sees things fully but does not change them."

Viktor #Shklovsky on tragedy, censorship, statecraft. I feel like this relates to today's dearth of humour in discourse, films, etc. Keeping everything tragic as ideological state apparatus. In this essay he's retracting his previous views on art... or is he? https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/2014/04/17/monument-to-a-scientific-error/

Viktor #Shklovsky on tragedy, censorship, statecraft. I feel like this relates to today's dearth of humour in discourse, films, etc. Keeping everything tragic as ideological state apparatus

Viktor #Shklovsky on tragedy, censorship, statecraft

Also I think #Tolstoy was reading #Thackeray when he was fighting in the Crimean War? And #Shklovsky was writing literary criticism on the other front from #Wittgenstein. Could be fun to write something on "What we read while fighting." Or even "What pacifists read at war." Not that they all necessarily became pacifists. Just thinking aloud...

I spoke to a friend of mine about #film #literature #beauty and #iridescence, including #Tolstoy #Shklovsky #Powell and #Pressburger, #Wenders and more.
https://anchor.fm/bkam/episodes/Film--beauty--and-iridescence-e1rt0qe

Viktor #Shklovsky on how new cultural forms emerge. First, a kind of pressure builds up from adjacent disciplines. When the new form emerges, the old one changes functionally but not formally.

#philosophy #evolution