1 Permanent Defamiliarization as Rhetorical Device or: How to Let Puppymonkeybaby into Unnatural Narratology Stefan Iversen, Aarhus University, Denmark [*preprint version* - final version in Style 2016] Brian Richardson’s work on the unnatural, spanning more than ten years, presents and refines two insights that continue to strike me as original and important. The first is the observation that what Richardson calls “anti-mimetic tendencies” are an integral part of (not only modern) literary narratives. The second is the idea that most of the dominant unified theories of narrative have been hindered in dealing adequately with these tendencies, due to their implicit or explicit reliance on models of storytelling derived from the way in which nonfictional narratives typically function. The following suggestions should be situated in the context of this broad appreciation of the general thrust behind Richardson’s contribution to narrative theory. What I want to suggest is that rather than talking about the unnatural narrative as a certain type of fictional narrative, an autonomous innovative or experimental text, we might consider talking pragmatically about the unnatural as a rhetorical device, defined in relation to existing processes of sense-making, rather than in relation to existing texts or poetics. While inspired by, and in most instances compatible with Richardson’s position, the approach suggested is motivated by an attempt to address a concern raised by the observation that the idea of the unnatural as anti-mimetic is based on what I find to be a debatable distinction between fiction and nonfiction. A pragmatic, rhetorical approach might be considered better-designed for addressing not only the different functions of unnatural devices but also the many cases where such devices appear locally in otherwise traditional types of narratives, or appear outside of generic fiction, be it in poetry, in everyday communication, or in rhetorical discourse, such as advertisements. An example of the last is the advertisement featuring “Puppymonkeybaby,” a video spot aired in 2016 to promote the soft drink MTN DEW Kickstart (Mountain). The main protagonist of the short narrative is a CGI-generated, photorealistic, and fully-animated, hybrid creature with the head of a dog, the torso of a monkey, and the legs of a human baby. I establish my thesis through a short discussion of one of the main premises underlying Richardson’s definition of unnatural narratives, followed by a rereading of one of the most