Shklovsky wrote his essay "Art as Technique" in 1917, a significant year in Russian history. In this essay, he discusses defamiliarization or estrangement, which is a form of writing that encourages us to see the familiar in new, and often jarring, ways. Instead of condoning using familiar language to describe objects in a traditional manner, he argues that the very function of art is to cause readers to see the ordinary afresh, as if encountering it for the first time. Shklovsky argues in favor of a literature that slows people down and forces them to think about what they are reading, instead of literature that churns out a series of glib cliches people can run their eyes over without having to deeply engage with the text. This serves a political function by challenging orthodox thinking, making Shklovsky's theories palatable to the new Leninist regime.

Many modernist writers were experimenting with defamiliarization, whether they had heard of Shklovsky or not. They used techniques that slowed readers down and presented the world in new ways—ways (these writers hoped) that more accurately represented reality, such as stream-of-consciousness writing, which captured the subjectivity of experience. These writers, such as Gertrude Stein, and in a somewhat different way, Virginia Woolf, also borrowed from music terminology. They often used word repetition in their prose to associate characters with leitmotifs through phrases that became a part of their personalities. For example, in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsey becomes, through repetition, associated with the Charles Elton's poem "Luriana Lurilee." Other techniques of defamiliarization include point of view, such as Jean Rhys's retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the "mad" Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea, or through expanding or compressing time, another technique Woolf employed.

In "Art as Technique," Shlovksy addresses the ways in which people do things habitually to the point of doing them automatically or unconsciously. He uses the example that holding a pen for the first time is, of course, much different from holding it for the ten thousandth time. By the ten thousandth time, it is so automatic, we don't think about doing it; and to the extreme extent that we don't consciously think about holding the pen, it is as if we are not doing it. Clearly, we do this for the economy of it, to focus on other things. But this is a habit of passive thinking and action. 

Shklovsky notes that we perceive objects in this passive, or half-attentive way. Using Pogodin's example of the sentence "The Swiss mountains are beautiful", Shlovksy gives his algebraic formulation of it as "T, S, m, a, b." He suggests that, in our habitual inattentiveness, we perceive objects in this condensed way as well. We only pay attention to a small or surface aspect of the object. 

In general, this is a problem in our individual lives. Being habitually unaware of everything that is going on locally and in the world is a lack of individual and social awareness. In being passive, we become familiar with objects in this algebraic, condensed form. The technique of art is to make these things "unfamiliar" and to make us more active, less passive, to make us exert more effort in perceiving things and thinking about them. 

This is why Shklovsky, and others after him, believed that poetry fills this criteria  of making the familiar unfamiliar (more so than prose). Poetry is condensed but with odd juxtapositions of words and "roughened" rhythm and language, the reader is forced to slow down and think more about each word and its associations with the other words and the poem as a whole. This is the effect of defamiliarization. By making the familiar unfamiliar, the author or artist creates a work in which the reader can not simply perceive it automatically; he/she has to give more effort, think more actively and creatively. 

Shklovsky uses an example from Tolstoy's "Kholstomer." This section is narrated by a horse; this is the first instrument of defamiliarization. The reader must be consciously aware that he/she is reading from the perspective of a horse. To read automatically, he/she might forget this important technique. In attempting to understand the notion of "private property," the horse contemplates how and why private property exists, concluding that it seems wrong:

There are people who call a tract of land their own, but they never set eyes on it and never take a stroll on it. There are people who call others their own, yet never see them. And the whole relationship between them is that the so-called "owners" treat the others unjustly. 

The horse describes a familiar thing "private property" in an unfamiliar way. Thereby, the reader must consider this familiar thing in an unfamiliar way from an unfamiliar narrator/source. The effect is that the reader actively, not passively, considers private property and possibly will see it in a new way. To the horse, the significant relationship between people who own other people is not the idea of ownership; rather, the horse understands this relationship by the actual interactions therein (by the deeds or actions). And this is that the owners treat those they own poorly. 

How does Shklovsky's "Art as Technique" illustrate defamiliarization in literature?

There are numerous examples of literature which rely on defamiliarization on the part of the reader. These texts force the reader to no longer rely on the stereotypes and expectations presented in much of the literary canon.

One example where defamiliarization is present for the reader to reconsider what he or she is reading and become a more active reader is "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," by the American anthropologist Horace Miner. In this text, Miner deceives readers into thinking that they are reading about a little known North American clan. By using such highly negative diction, many readers fail to see that Miner is actually describing them. Although never disclosed in his essay, Nacirema backward spells American. Readers are forced to defamiliarize themselves with themselves—something intrinsically difficult.

Another text which forces defamiliarization is David Foster Wallace's essay "This is Water." Delivered as a commencement speech at Kenyon College (2005), Wallace tries to explain the importance of seeing that we, as individuals, are not the center of the world. In fact,

a huge percentage of the stuff that [we] tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

Our desire to make everything about us is faulty—because we fail to consider that it, in fact, may not be about us at all. This idea forces readers to experience defamiliarization. What we thought we knew about how the world works is not how it actually works, as long as we look at the world from a place that does not place us at the center.

A final text which depends upon defamiliarization is Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance." This text forces readers to become, as the title suggests, self-reliant. He urges readers to look to their own ideologies, instead of those which force them to conform to societal expectations. He urges readers to listen to their inner voices about their own self-worth, over the overly negative voices of defeat. He urges readers to find honesty in the world around them, especially in their relationships. In the end, it is the forced defamiliarization that allows the reader to grow.

Defamiliarization is the effect of a literary work that disrupts the reader's habitual perception of the world. One of the ways this is done is to make the familiar unfamiliar. For Shklovsky, art achieves defamiliarization by removing "objects from the automatism of perception." Defamiliarization is achieved if the style, structure, or theme is presented in a strange and/or unfamiliar way; as long as that presentation causes the reader to slow down, reconsider, and actively (and/or creatively) think about what he's reading, defamiliarization is achieved. The goal is to provoke the reader to be more thoughtful and active in thinking and reading. 

One example of defamiliarization is in Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. The first instance of defamiliarization is that the opening chapter is narrated by a woodworm on Noah's ship. This is an unfamiliar perspective of this story and the woodworm gives an interpretation of Noah and the events surrounding the flood that are also unique: 

I don't know how to break this to you, but Noah was not a nice man. I realize this idea is embarrassing, since you are all descended from him; still, there it is. He was a monster, a puffed-up patriarch who spent half his day grovelling to his God and the other half taking it out on us. 

In "A Defence of Poetry," Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." 

In Sylvia Plath's "Three Women," the 'FIRST VOICE' describes childbirth in an odd way, causing the reader to think about the details and the aesthetics: 

Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales. He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material. 

Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godotplays with defamiliarization and estrangement. The audience is compelled to consider and reconsider just what is going on, who Godot might be, why this is even considered a play, etc. Anything that is strange and causes the reader/audience to take time to ponder and reconsider things is a use of defamiliarization. In painting, Picasso is a great example of an artist who used an innovative style to create images that were quite strange and/or unfamiliar. In "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a precursor to Cubism, Picasso presented the female form in a very unconventional way.