Poetics of Defamiliarisation in Craig Raine’s Selected Poems
Muhammed Fattah Rasheed
University of Mosul / College of Education for Humanities
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.6.4.1.13
Keywords: antithesis, defamiliarisation, deviation, foregrounding poetics, Raine
Abstract
Defamiliarisation is one of the techniques that has been studied by literary criticism; especially the Russian formalist one. It is the technique of alienating or making estrangement. This study attempts at investigating the three devices of defamiliarisation (deviation, foregrounding, and antithesis) in Craig Raine’s selected poems: “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” “An Attempt at Jealousy” and “Heaven on Earth”. The selected poems represent Raine’s best poems and the prominent example exemplifying the use of defamiliarisation in his poetry. The study aims at uncovering the poetic and aesthetic function of the technique of defamiliarisation in Raine’s poems. The significance of this study lies in its focusing on the role of defamiliarisation in communicating themes of the three poems. It applies Jan Mukařovský’s formalist theory, Roman Jakobson’s theory of poetics and Roger Fowler's theory of literary discourse. It concludes that three techniques of defamiliarisation perform their poetic and aesthetic functions through their metrical structures, which are constructed over the structures of the linguistic expressions of the poetic lines.
