Strange Revolution: Viktor Shklovsky and the Formalism of Feeling

This essay unearths the empiricist epistemology underwriting Viktor Shklovsky's early formalist theory, and argues that it provides a fundamental and largely unacknowledged link to the eighteenth-century tradition of sentiment. I contend that his call for attunement to the strangeness of relations is premised on a renewed encounter with sensibility indebted to the self-reflexive configuration of the sentimental novel. Excavating this genealogy reveals that ostranenie , or estrangement, is not simply a revivification of the world, but an instrument of feeling. Shklovsky's revolutionary memoir, A Sentimental Journey (1923), which I consider in the last section of this essay, models the epistemic potential of sentimental aesthetics under some of the most extreme conditions of existence: revolution and war.