Religion and War Made Strange: Ostranenie in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five Alexandra Berlina ABSTRACT Kurt Vonnegut was arguably the American twentieth-century specialist in ostranenie (also known as “defamiliarization” and “estrangement”). Nevertheless, this aspect of his work has re- ceived very little attention so far. The present article hopes to fll part of this lacuna, concentrat- ing on the way war and religion are made strange in Slaughterhouse-Five (with some mentions of other works such as Breakfast for Champions). The analysis of these effects forms the bulk of the article (part II), fanked by considerations on ostranenie, particularly in the context of Von- negut’s and Shklovsky’s war experience (part I), and an overview of Vonnegut’s precursors in the ostranenie of religion and war, such as Swift, Twain, and Heller (part III). Shklovsky and Vonnegut Some writers are or pretend to be disinterested in scholarly reception, but not Kurt Vonnegut. Shortly before his death, Vonnegut complained about insuffcient academic attention (Shields 1; 4–5). He would have been gratifed by the amount of research published in recent years. Considering the importance he ascribed to his German roots (describing himself on the title page of Slaughterhouse-Five, he begins by stating that he is “a fourth-generation German-American”), he might have been particularly fattered by the attention his oeuvre is receiving in Germany, such as Peter Freese’s opus magnum The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, or the recent decision to make Slaughterhouse-Five a must-read for “Abitur” exams in the federal state of Hesse, coupled with the ap- pearance of a lavishly annotated edition intended for school use. But despite all critical engagement, one aspect of Vonnegut’s work has received very little atten- tion: namely, his use of ostranenie. Ostranenie, as described a hundred years ago by the Russian literary scholar and fction writer Viktor Shklovsky in a paper entitled “Art as Device,” is a way to make things real by making them strange—to his mind, one of the main goals of art. 1 The concept was inspired by Lev Tolstoy’s observation that habitual ac- tions disappear from conscious memory. Instead of being glad to have mental 1 Original title: “Iskusstvo[,] kak priyom.” The article was frst rendered into English as “Art as Technique”; this translation, though still widely used, exhibits an array of misunder- standings. Presently, I used the title as translated by Sher (“Art as Device”) and myself; in the publication in Poetics Today cited here I also used the comma that appeared in one of the ver- sions of Shklovsky’s article. In the present article, Shklovsky is always quoted as translated by me unless stated differently.