Lee T. Lemon

Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.… (mer)

[Review in progress]

A slim volume containing four Russian essays on formalist literary theory, which concentrates on the textual structure, style, and form of a literary work.

Two of the essays in this volume are by Victor Shklovsky: Art as Technique, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary. In the former, Shklovsky examines the use - or the theory of use - of symbolism as an artistic device, and interestingly expands on the idea that prose does not reduce reality to symbols as some critics claim, but instead exposes reality - in some ways making it more real - by describing it beyond the mental symbolism that humans subconsciously reduce the world around them to in order to function effectively. The latter is a deconstruction of literary devices utilized in Sterne's classic work, such as manipulation of time and the discovered manuscript.… (mer)