Traditionally, any form of scholarship or indeed fascination with the Orient, meaning the countries generally referred to today as the Middle East (but also encompassing the whole of North Africa, Turkey, Pakistan, and the northern tip of India). Said, Edwardâs book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978) transformed the term from a relatively neutral, though obviously biased, name for a venerable field of study dating back several hundred years, into an indictment of bigotry and racism. Saidâs work emptied Orientalism of its previously positive associations and connotations and put in their place a long list of charges. Indeed, there are few critical reversals of the meaning of terms as complete as Saidâs demolition of Orientalism. His basic charge is that the Orient as conceived by the Orientalists (primarily, but not exclusively, English, French, and German) is a fiction of their own imagining bearing no resemblance to the actual Orient, which, as Said points out, is a vastly complicated region. He notes, too, that many of the most famous Orientalist scholars never even visited the Orient, relying instead on second-hand accounts of it, as though the actuality of the Orient did not really interest them. This fictional Orient conjured up by Orientalists is, Said shows (using the work of Foucault, Michel as his inspiration), a discursive production, a fantastic place that is the product of hundreds of years of mystification, exoticization, and outright deception made possible by the discrepant power relations between West and East. The problem, he argues, is that the Westâs ongoing fantasy of the Orient has real effects: insofar as the West understands the Orient as backward, unenlightened, irrational, sexually deviant, unhealthy, uninviting, and so on, it forms its politics accordingly (one has only to recall Donald Rumsfeldâs callous disregard for the looting of Iraqâs national museum following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 to see the consequences of this). In the 30 years since its publication, Orientalism, has become a cornerstone of Postcolonial Studies. Further Reading: B. Moore-Gilbert Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (1997). ostranenie (defamiliarization or estrangement) A central concept in Russian Formalismâs attempt to describe and define what constitutes literaturnost (literariness). A neologism, it implies two kinds of actions: making strange, and pushing aside. Consistent with this double meaning, the concept refers to the techniques writers use to transform ordinary language into poetic language, which for the Russian Formalists is language which induces a heightened state of perception. Habit, according to the Russian Formalists, is the enemy of art, therefore to produce art the writer has to force the reader outside of the usual patterns of perception by making the familiar appear strange or different. The principal theorist of this concept, Shklovsky, Viktor, uses a famous passage in Tolstoyâs War and Peace (1869), where an opera is described as âpainted cardboard and oddly dressed men and women who moved, spoke and sang strangely in a patch of blazing lightâ to exemplify this concept. Basically what Tolstoy does, according to Shklovsky in Theory of Prose (1990), is view things out of context, or to put it another way he fails to see the thing that makes the actions he describes either meaningful or coherent and in this way he defamiliarizes them. In The Prison-House of Language (1972), Jameson, Fredric enumerates three advantages of the concept of ostranenie: firstly, it enables literary theory itself to come into being by providing a way of distinguishing its object---namely, poetic language; secondly, it enables a hierarchy to be established within works and between works (i.e. more or less defamiliarizing); thirdly, it generates a new way of thinking literary history in terms of ruptures and breaks rather than continuities and influences. The problem with this concept, however, is that it is psychological rather than purely textual, inasmuch as it is premised on the deadened senses of the reader being awakened by clever writing rather than something specific to the writing itself. Obviously, too, this process suffers from the logic of diminishing returns---what was shocking yesterday is all too familiar today, thus demanding an ever greater level of shock to achieve a decreasingly small level of shock value (this, as many commentators have observed, is the problem contemporary non-representational art also faces). See also cognitive estrangement; estrangement-effect. Further Reading: T. Bennett Formalism and Marxism (1979). V. Erlich Russian Formalism: History---Doctrine (1955).