Viktor Shklovsky
"Art as Technique"
(orig. 1917)
"If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important...
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... I personally feel that defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found… An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it, its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object - it creates a vision of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it…
Jan Mukařovský
"Standard language and poetic language"
(orig. 1932)
A recent Czech opinion has it that “esthetic evaluation must be excluded from language, since there is no place where it can be applied. It is useful and necessary for judging style, but not language”... ...I do want to point out, in opposition..., that esthetic valuation is a very important factor in the formation of the norm of the standard; on the one hand because the conscious refinement of the language cannot do without it, on the other hand because it sometimes, in part, determines the development of the norm of the standard.
... Dessoir says about it ["esthetic phenomena"]: “The striving for beauty need not be limited in its manifestation to the specific forms of the arts. The esthetic needs are, on the contrary, so potent that they affect almost all the acts of man”. ... . If [so],...it is indeed not very probable that language would be exempt from esthetic valuation; in other words, that its use would not be subject to the laws of taste.