Estranhamento e literatura

Abstract

The relationship between estrangement and literature can be summarized as a procedure of defamiliarization, promoted through literary work. Through a study that intertwines aesthetics and psychoanalysis, Freud expands the concept of the uncanny, which begins to encompass the notion of a repressed familiar content that returns transformed. Chklovski's formalism introduces the notion of estrangement, as a literary procedure that singularizes objects to retain attention and rescue the perception of automatism. Walter Benjamin analyzes the strangeness of modern life, transforming Freudian trauma into a clash with modernity. He diagnoses the unconscious automatism that governs life in modern cities, and also notes that people's connection with tradition has been destroyed. Benjamin proposes a fusion of artistic forms that uses resources from new reproducibility techniques to reestablish the possibility of an authentic experience within modernity. He adopts literary montage as a procedure to generate the effect of estrangement. Art is a privileged means of estrangement, establishing an intersection with the world of life. There are correspondences between the wonder that art can generate and the astonishment that Socratic practice seeks to provoke. A close relationship can be established between the concept of estrangement and the truth of skepticism and the strangeness of the ordinary proposed by Stanley Cavell. With the expansion of perspective, estrangement allows the formation of continuous centers of reflection, as described by Richard Eldridge.