Abstract
Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem, sex as a platitude - all this I find too tedious for words. Let us skip sex. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions 1 But you're not a girl - you're a guy. Why would a guy want to marry a guy? Tony Curtis to Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot 2 Early in the twentieth century a talented group of Russian literary critics, known collectively as the Formalists, began to analyze literary prose as a collection of "devices" that could be isolated, described, understood, and - by the right student - copied. One of these Formalist critics, Viktor Shklovsky, developed the theory of "art as device" in his study "Iskusstvo kak Priyom (Art as Device)", 3 in which he famously analyzed the technique of "making strange" (ostranenie). In "making strange," a writer, according to Shklovsky, would take the familiar, the ordinary, the taken-for-granted, and describe it as if seen for the first time. 4 The writer thus removes the cobwebs of cliche and convention, all the words and responses on tap, and makes each of us into a Miranda espying Ferdinand for the first time. Everything we may take for granted - weather vanes, Walmart, window displays, and even wedding vows between a man and a woman - suddenly can be endowed with a sense of the unfamiliar, the strange, the bizarre. One locus classicus for the Formalists is Tolstoy's description, in War and ...