The Little Prince

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The Little Prince

In "Art as Technique" Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky introduces defamiliarisation as a literary device to help readers regain our sensation of things, which we have become unaware of, as our perception gets automatised through habitualisation (Shklovsky, 20). Shklovsky then goes on to engage in a discussion of the methodologies employed in creating the effect of defamiliarisation, treating defamiliarisation as purely a technique of art. However this may be an oversimplification of the concept of defamiliarisation, which is based upon certain principles of perception, and perception is in turn a central component of social cognition. Hence, it is the aim of this paper to explore the relations between the effect of defamiliarisation and the social cognitive elements of perception. Through the use of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, the defamiliarisation effect can be explained by the non-conformation of its elements of discourse, namely genre, character filter, social setting and the use of poetic language, to the cognitive structures of prototypes, schemas and heuristics held by the adult reader.

For those who are unfamiliar with the story of The Little Prince, this narrative depicts the adventures of a little prince from a distant star as he embarks on a journey to six other planets. He finds, isolated on each planet, a king with only a rat as his subject, a conceited man, a drinker, a business man who own stars, a lamplighter forever lighting and extinguishing a single street lamp, and a geographer who does not explore his own planet. Finally the little prince makes his way to Earth, where he meets a fox and learns to tame it. Upon roaming about the desert, the little prince chances upon ...

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...ation, however, is that it is subjective, depending on the type of reader of the narrative, as well as the social context which the reader is socialised into. Hence, while The Little Prince is able to create a defamiliarising effect on its adult readers, it may or may not be able to defamiliarise its children readers using the same elements of discourse.

Works Cited

Howard, Judith A. "Social Cognition". Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology. Massachussetts: Allyn & Bacon. 1995. 90-117.

Neale, Stephen. "Expectation and Verisimilitude". Excerpted from "Questions of Genre". Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P. 1995. 159-183.

Saint-Exupéry, de Antoine. The Little Prince. London: Penguin, 1998.

Shklovsky, Victor. "Art as Technique". Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. Harlow: Longman, 1988. 15-30.

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