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Memorability and defamiliarization
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--- Stan Kelly-Bootle <skb@BOOTLE.BIZ> wrote:
>We are left to ponder WHY poetry is so ‘memorable’
when each >unrolling word/phrase is presumably fresh,
cliché-free, and >unexpected — and therefore packed
with ‘information’ -- and >therefore more taxing to
memorize? Of course, one can mention >meter and rhyme
as common mnemonic aids.
Literary critics, not often statisticians, refer to
this as defamiliarisation (ostranenie). It is
precisely because a word/phrase is new that it is
memorable. Nabokov's work, as it were, makes Shklovsky
(and Bakhtin) familiar.
Best,
Piers Smith
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>We are left to ponder WHY poetry is so ‘memorable’
when each >unrolling word/phrase is presumably fresh,
cliché-free, and >unexpected — and therefore packed
with ‘information’ -- and >therefore more taxing to
memorize? Of course, one can mention >meter and rhyme
as common mnemonic aids.
Literary critics, not often statisticians, refer to
this as defamiliarisation (ostranenie). It is
precisely because a word/phrase is new that it is
memorable. Nabokov's work, as it were, makes Shklovsky
(and Bakhtin) familiar.
Best,
Piers Smith
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm