Even when the narrator has left childhood behind, looking back through his younger eyes affords the novelist this same defamiliarization of the ordinary, adult world. Charles Dickens uses Pip in Great Expectations (1861), for instance, to critique the notion of gentility as broadly understood in Victorian England. The Russian critic Viktor Schlovsky gives us the term “defamiliarization,” by which he means “making strange,” or turning the familiar and ordinary into something strange and wondrous. This magic, he says, is what literature does for us, thereby making us reexamine what we thought we
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