what is this?

What's the appeal of literature? The Russian Formalists said that what makes literature what it is, is 'defamiliarization', which means to make something strange. So, it's as if you're seeing something familiar in a new light. 

The most interesting thing to me is how literature does this, and the Russian Formalists, Victor Shklovsky, to be exact, explained that literature does this by extending the time of perception. This is what fascinates me - the mechanics of that. 

There are different ways to explain it. One way is to compare simple, factual language to poetic or literary language. When you're reading a recipe or some kind of workplace document, a lot of your thinking is automatic. If the recipe says, 'use one onion', that's all there is to it. You don't have to think about the meaning of the onion. But in literature, an onion could represent all kinds of things...just think of the old phrase, 'pealing the onion'. So, that's one way that literature slows down our perception and thereby makes things strange and interesting - the language is just richer; it makes us think more. 

Another way to explain it, which is my favorite and it's how I was first taught the concept of defamiliarization, is related to the nature of written language. We can read in our heads more quickly than we can read out loud, and we can think much more quickly than we can read. The act of reading - following the text word by word - slows you down, and it's in that extra space that defamiliarization happens.