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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2017

Comparatism and defamiliarization

Résumé

Comparatism, especially if it is envisaged in the most traditional way as a confrontation between cultural artifacts belonging to different geographical areas and languages, aims at promoting knowledge by way of parallels and analogies. Most often it is a question of relating a reference corpus to less well-known foreign works: in this respect it is the clearest example of an endeavor that brings the unknown under the known, and that can be qualified as familiarization. This type of approach has fueled the most common criticisms leveled at this discipline, in particular from a postcolonial perspective, pointing out the bias caused by a comparison that systematically takes Western corpora and categories as their reference. Praise for the discipline, on the contrary, often appeals to the fact that it promotes closer contact between peoples and cultures. In any case, neither the accusers nor defenders of literary comparatism think that it works by distancing itself from the objects it studies. Defamiliarization, in whichever of its numerous versions one takes, aims at making strange and foreign what is considered, wrongly or rightly, as known and familiar, in some kind of relation of proximity to oneself. The inventor of the notion, Viktor Shklovsky, in 1916, created a neologism to express this idea. Shklovsky was not referring to a method used in a discipline, but a process in art: it is our relationship to the world that art, by means of its form, defamiliarizes, by privileging sensation, sterilized by the automatisms of modern life. It is worth noting that Shklovsky is not thinking particularly of avant-garde art but cites Tolstoy and the erotic riddles of popular culture. As a result, how can the alliance of ‘comparatism’ and ‘defamiliarization,’ to all appearances rather far apart, even antagonistic to one another in their principles and objectives, be useful? In this article I propose first brief review of the notion of ‘defamiliarization,’ emphasizing the ambiguity and the contradictions that its reception has displayed. Then I show how defamiliarization can serve to define a renewed comparatism, by asking why the latter is functional and necessary in a context of globalization that has supposedly abolished otherness.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-03976142 , version 1 (06-02-2023)

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Françoise Lavocat. Comparatism and defamiliarization. Franz Zipfel. Fremde Ähnlichkeiten Schriften zur Weltliteratur, 4, J.B. Metzler, pp.68-77, 2017, 978-3-476-04342-9. ⟨10.1007/978-3-476-04342-9_4⟩. ⟨hal-03976142⟩

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