Ostranenie, Innovation, and Media History

Abstract

There are, undoubtedly, many ways in which Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie can be used in a variety of fields. Even though the concept was conceived with regard to literature, right from the very beginning its scope was that of a general aesthetic principle, and thus, ostranenie has also been adopted by the neoformalist approach elaborated by Kristin Thompson (1981 and 1988). In this essay, I would like to concentrate on the way in which the concept (or principle) can be made or has been made productive for work in the domain of film history and, by extension, for media history in a larger sense, independently of whether or not the scholars referred to here do indeed acknowledge any debt to Shklovsky’s ideas.