deformalization

According to the Russian Formalist school of literary criticism, 'defamiliarization' is the fundamental essence of literature. Language prolongs the perceptive process, leading the reader to question and enrich the meaning being conveyed. Does it though? Yes. Consider how we can think much faster than we read, or how we can read much faster in our heads than we can read aloud. 

If you perceive an event or object yourself, you will form certain impressions and views about it. If you read a text about it, you are perceiving that event or object through the text. Your mind has to process the text, and that slows it down, giving it more time to create meaning. And during that extra time, the object or event is defamiliarized, because you are perceiving a text, not the object or event itself.

When we are familiar with something, we don't really look closely at it. We already know it so we don't have to pay attention to it. Viewing that thing through a text gets us to slow down and pay attention to it, which 'makes it strange'.