Women's Humor & Defamiliarization

Yesterday during our class discussion on the female literary humor, I kept thinking about Viktor Shklovsky's "Art as Technique." Here, the critic describes the process of "over-automization": "perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic" (15). In essence, as we read or participate in our daily lives, we lose sight of the very shape of things--we don't think, we don't look, we don't sense. Shklovsky posits, however, that the way to break from the cycle of automization is through art, for successful art renders the normal object unfamiliar, through a technique he calls "defamiliarization" (16).

Defamiliarization essentially encourages viewers to see objects or situations outside of their normal context. In the excerpts we read from Redressing the Balance, most of those authors rely on the technique of defamiliarization in order to make their pieces funny. The most obvious example--and one we mentioned several times yesterday--is Anna Stephens' treatment of the corset. Indeed, an outsider interprets the corset as a side saddle; at the same time, the reader (particularly the reader familiar with a corset) must now take on that outsider's perspective and "defamiliarize" the ordinary object.

Defamiliarization also surfaces in Knight's journal entry, and, I would argue, can only occur in this way because she is an outsider--and she is female. Readers familiar with travel are forced to re-view the expedition from a new perspective, one where girlish fear coincides with standards of manner and, for lack of a better word, her feminine "prissiness."

In many ways, defamiliarization shares traits with incongruity. However, the artistic quailities of defamiliarization are greater. Changing situational expectations does create humor, as audiences often appreciate the element of surprise. Defamiliarization plays with this element of surprise, too; but the technique also plays with audience's senses and perception, and, because of this, it requires more aesthetic participation.


For more on Shklovsky:
Shklovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 15-20.