Introduction

Abstract

Schopenhauer once wrote of how the common mass of people lived existence as if surrounded by the smells of a perfume shop — so engendered were they by its environment, that they were unable to recognise its distinctive beauty. Anyone who has taken the trouble to reflect on the nature of perception will agree with Schopenhauer that the means we have for registering information about the world that surrounds us is constrained and filtered through the screen of habit. From the rituals of daily routine to the paradigms that construct our experiences of reality, perception does indeed have a regularised quality which if we notice it at all, we find profoundly comforting. One of the distinctive aspects to creative thought is the conviction that perception could (and should) be something quite different. Curious inquiry, so the assumption goes, re-presents the heady sensations of experience, or at least the means to understand them. Through prising off the carapace of routine, criticism allows the intellectual to extend the boundaries of what can be said about an experience. In different ways, philosophy and literature have sought procedures that would estrange the object of perception in order to render it paradoxically more beautiful, more knowable, or both. It is not an exaggeration to assert that estrangement of some kind, in fact, is presupposed by all forms of critical analysis.