Victor Shklovsky

For whatever it is worth, Victor Schklovksy's aesthetic philosophy left a deep impression on me many years ago when I read him for my literary theory colloquium class in college. Here's a quote similar to the one that I remember vividly from college:

"The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." (Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 12.)

What I remember is Shklovsky giving an analogy involving a man walking on a rocky path. When one walks barefoot on the rocky path, initially one feels the rocks beneath one's feet. But the longer one walks, the more insensitive one becomes to the rocks. Art exists to make "the rock rocky again," or more technically, to defamiliarize the familiar. I believe in this, personally. It's one of the few times from college where I actually agreed with the theorist, actually.