Defamiliarization

Shklovsky coined ostranenie — defamiliarization — to name what artists had done for millennia without theoretical vocabulary: make the familiar strange. Art exists, Shklovsky argued, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perceiving is itself an aesthetic end. Greene seized the concept as the engine of her educational philosophy. Education worth the name does not merely transmit information; it defamiliarizes the student's world, disrupting habitual categories and forcing her to see what routine consciousness has rendered invisible. The encounter with a poem that refuses easy interpretation, a painting that resists single meaning, or an argument that unsettles comfortable assumptions produces a small liberation — the recognition that the taken-for-granted is one arrangement among many. In the AI era, the question is whether the outputs of generative systems can perform this operation, or whether their fluent, confident, statistically-central production systematically works against it.