Journal of Literature & Theology, Vol. 3, No. 2, June 1991 AUTOMATIZATION AND DEFAMILIARIZATION IN LUKE 7:36 —501 James L. Resseguie In 1917 the brilliant Russian Formalist, Victor Shklovsky, coined the term 'defamiliarization'2 (ostranenie, which means literally 'making strange') in 'Art as Technique'.3 The concept influenced not only the direction Formal ism would take in the twenties, but it continues to exert a strong influence today on reader-response criticism.4 Defamiliarization is the creative dis torting of a familiar object or a routine convention to make it appear strange and unfamiliar. Normal, everyday perception, since it is habitual and automatic, recognizes objects as mere silhouettes and fails to see them. Although 'over-automatization ... permits the greatest economy of percept ive effort,' it makes stale our awareness of the world.5 The purpose of art, on the other hand, is to impede our routine perception of things and to force us to take notice of objects. Art imparts 'the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,' according to Shklovsky. It 'is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important' (emphasis Shklovsky, 1965, p. 12). For the Formalists, art opposes automatization. 'Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war ... Art exists that one may recover a sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony' (emphasis Shklovsky, 1965, p. 12). By using devices that increase 'the difficulty and length of perception,' defamiliarization strips away the familiar film that blurs everyday perception and awakens the reader from the lethargy of the habitual. Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization is useful for literary analyses of the New Testament gospels, for it helps define their 'literariness,' that is, the qualities that make them literary. For the Formalists, the object of critical investigation is not literature itself, but the 'literariness' of an artistic work, and in fact, it is the presence of defamiliarizing devices that makes a work artistic.6 In non-literary works—ordinary prose discourse, for instance—words and phrases beg to be ignored, but the same phrases and words are deformed in works of imaginative literature. By accounting for 'making strange' devices such as roughened rhythm, a deformed context, Oxford University Press 1991