From its own perspective, why would a cat assume faces should be covered with hair? Why would it perceive the center of the student's face as...

employs a technique
ofwhich is now generally known as "Defamiliarization." The Russian term
"Ostranenie" is also sometimes used, as the technique was described by the Russian
formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his 1917 essay "Art as Device." Although many formalist
writers adopted this technique, it would be quite wrong to think of it as beginning with them,
since it is also used in eighteenth-century satirical works such as Gulliver's
Travels.

Defamiliarization involves an attempt to make the reader
think differently about the world by describing it from an unfamiliar perspective. It is
particularly used to describe aspects of everyday life which we generally think are mundane or
do not think about at all.achieves this effect by making the narrator a cat and describing human
behavior and appearances from the cat's perspective. Just as we think that our view of the world
is the default position, so does the cat. The cat assumes that it is natural for faces to be
covered with hair because this is what a cat's face is like. Similarly, a human nose would seem
like an exceptionally long protuberance to a cat, or most other animals except elephants and
tapirs. Looking at the world and ourselves as a cat might do allows us to see our own
strangeness.