David, glad you found another opening to contribute to this discussion.

“Jeffrey is doing a good job trying to avoid the fate embodied in a joke 
I made up while writing a Master's Thesis on (gasp!) Ted Hughes in 
1976:

Q. What's the difference between a dissertation and a scholarly book?
A. A dissertation is guaranteed five readers.”

Nice joke. Don’t see how it says much about the cogency or not of my 
argument, though.

“Which brings me to defamiliarization. I think Browning ('Makers-see') is 
more important for this aesthetic than Wordsworth--and I'd chuck in the 
Germans too. But the notion is pan-Romantic and you can't argue that 
Wordsworth ‘invented’ it. Here's Coleridge, for instance: ‘Ideas may 
become as vivid and distinct, and the feelings accompanying them as 
vivid, as original impressions. And this may finally make a man 
independent of his Senses. One use of poetry.’”

I don’t think I said Wordsworth invented defamiliarisaton, but that the 
idea can be traced back to him. Of course, others, as you say, have 
expressed the idea in different ways. Here is a quote from my article on 
Heaney, which may amplify the connection between defamiliarisaton, 
Coleridge and Wordsworth:

“Interestingly, Heaney’s use of defamiliarisation owes more than a 
slight debt to Coleridge’s understanding of something similar to it as 
alluded to in Biographia Literaria. In it Coleridge mentions with 
approval, an unpublished poem of Wordsworth’s he heard Wordsworth 
reading aloud one time. Of the poem Coleridge writes:

It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine 
balance of truth in the observing, with the imaginative faculty in 
modifying the objects observed [,,] and with it the depth and height of 
the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for 
the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up all 
the sparkle and the dew drops. 

Here we see a description of the workings on a poem of a method that 
achieves a similar affect to that which we now call defamiliarisation. It 
should also be considered, that Wordsworth’s poetic practice (as has 
been pointed out by Heaney in his Introduction to his selection of 
Wordsworth’s poems, published by Faber) favoured something akin to 
defamiliarisation. In discussing ‘Resolution and Independence’, Heaney 
remarks, with reference to Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads:

What happens [here] is that a common incident is viewed under a 
certain ‘colouring of imagination’; ordinary things are presented to the 
mind in an unusual way and made interesting.”

So although Wordsworth can’t be said to have invented it, his use of it 
is known and admired. That was all I was referring to in my response to 
Alison.




On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 07:00:52 -0700, David Latane 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Jeffrey is doing a good job trying to avoid the fate embodied in a joke 
I made up while writing a Master's Thesis on (gasp!) Ted Hughes in 
1976:
>Q. What's the difference between a dissertation and a scholarly book?
A. A dissertation is guaranteed five readers.
>If anyone is really interested, by the way in my 
dissertation, "'Energetic Exertion': Reading and the Romantic Long 
Poem, Blake's Jerusalem and Browning's Sordello". . . . just joking. 
About being interested, that is. That really is the title.
>Which brings me to defamiliarization. I think Browning ('Makers-see') 
is more important for this aesthetic than Wordsworth--and I'd chuck in 
the Germans too. But the notion is pan-Romantic and you can't argue 
that Wordsworth "invented" it. Here's Coleridge, for instance: "Ideas 
may become as vivid and distinct, and the feelings accompanying them 
as vivid, as original impressions. And this may finally make a man 
independent of his Senses. One use of poetry."
>One could argue as well that the effect of the sublime in that tradition 
(Kant, Burke, et alia) is to defamiliarize. A passage from the Critique of 
Judgement is sure to send us all back to sweet poesie:
>"Therefore the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own 
vocation, which we attribute to an Object of nature by a certain 
subreption (substitution of a respect for the Object in place of one for 
the idea of humanity, in our own self--the subject); and this feeling 
renders, as it were, inuitable the supremacy of our cognitive faculties 
on the rational side over the greatest faculty of sensibility."
>My cognitive faculties are being rendered inuitable -- time for more 
coffee,
>David Latané
>David Latané
>