According to Shklovsky, artistic texts use the exact same language as texts designed primarily to convey information, but do something different with it. The specific mechanism by which language becomes not merely a conduit to convey meaning, but something more, is called, in Russian, “ostraneniye,” most often translated as “defamiliarization,” though a more literal translation would be something like “strangeifying.”

Shklovsky describes how, as we go through our daily lives, our perceptions of things become “habitual” and “automatic.” We start to lose the sense of the actuality of things, and treat them as abstractions.

Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.