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Essay / Hymns and Habits: Examining Defamiliarization in Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
Percy Shelley uses defamiliarization in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” as a tool to dismantle religious belief systems. Defamiliarization is a literary technique used to make what is known and familiar seem different and new. Viktor Shklovsky argues that a person's perceptions have become habitual and it is this habitualization that prevents us from feeling the object. Rather, people unconsciously continue to interact with life without ever engaging with it or interacting with it. Jean Cocteau maintains that our interactions with objects prohibit the image and that we no longer see it. In “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” Shelley strips the Spirit of Beauty of the associations people attribute to it so that it can be seen only for what it is. He denounces the use of religious terms to describe the Spirit, which makes the Spirit unfamiliar because most people would be interested in it in religious terms. “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” is an ironic version of the traditional hymn and, instead of praising religion and God, it removes the usual mask that religion places on the Spirit of Beauty. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Defamiliarization is a literary technique that reveals the hidden beauty of things by making them unknown. The technique achieves this by presenting the thing and making it seem strange so that the perception of it changes. The term was coined by Viktor Shklovsky, who believed that "the aim of art is to convey the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known" (Shklovsky). The literary devices used by artists are distinguished from everyday language, which exposes objects and presents them in a new light. In this new light, the perception of the object shifts and its sensation is rediscovered. Shklovsky argues that “the general laws of perception [indicate that] perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic… [and] ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten.” Defamiliarization restores this essence and "removes the veil", revealing "the astonishing things which surround us and which our senses usually register mechanically" (Cocteau) Perception becomes automatic when one habitually engages with the object, as the explains Jean Cocteau: “All of a sudden”. , as in a flash, we see for the first time the dog, the carriage, the house. Soon after, habit erases this powerful image again. We pet the dog, we call the carriage, we live in a house that we don't live in. let's not see them anymore. » Cocteau argues that when one engages with objects and habit-associates them, one ceases to see the essence of the object. Shklovsky says: “After seeing an object several times, we begin to recognize it. is before us and we know it, but we don't see it – so we can't say anything meaningful about it. Once the object is automated, it loses its beauty and novelty and becomes just another thing in everyday life. Perception and sensation of the object are lost. In “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” the speaker suggests that, in a way, religion. accustoms the perception of the Spirit of Beauty. Religion is a way of engaging and rationalizing the unknown and sublime parts of life. In “Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Valley of Chamouni,” Coleridge attributes the sublime beauty of Mont Blanc. God and heaven, like “the soul dilated, bewitched, transfused,/in the powerful vision (1917): 15-21.