‘Estrangement’ in aesthetics and beyond: Russian formalism and phenomenological method

We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phenomenology using Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “estrangement” (ostranenie). In his letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Husserl claims that aesthetic and phenomenological experiences are similar; in the perception of a work of art we change our attitude in order to concentrate on how the things appear to us instead of what they are. A work of art “forces us into” the...