To practice ostranenie, or estrangement, is to battle automatic habits of perception by shifting perspectives or by disrupting expected relations among forms. Such artful manipulations, argued Shklovsky and many others, complicate representation, slow us down to make us sense anew, and make us re-cognize rather than merely recognize. This presentation will outline the aims and methods of one practitioner of estrangement, Vsevolod Meyerhold, in order then to pose a few speculative challenges to lingering presuppositions about the transformations we expect estrangement to affect, and about what it actually does or fails to do.

Alaina Lemon is an associate professor in the U-M Department of Anthropology. She is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist who works in Russia and the Former Soviet Union.