Translating Nouzha Fassi Fihri's La Baroudeuse: A Case Study in ...

Other literary theorists such as Victor Shklovsky and Wolfgang Iser
helped me focus on readers' response to and relationship with the text. Shklovsky
uses the term "defamiliarization" in reference to poetic techniques that make the
familiar seem strange such as the use of "difficult, roughened, impeded
language." 22 These techniques present conflicts the reader has to resolve, increase
the difficulty and length of perception, and awaken readers to the intricacy and
texture of verbal structure. According to Shklovsky, whereas ordinary language is
smooth and transparent, literary works "lay bare" and captivate the reader's
attention by making the world strange. Wolfgang Iser's term "horizon of
expectation" refers to everything that readers perceive to be normative and
normal, based on their memory of other texts, and notes that these expectations
change as readers experience new literary techniques. 23 Iser identifies two types
of "hypothetical" contemporary reader: the first constructed from social and
historical knowledge of the time, and the second extrapolated from the reader's
role laid down in the text (28). The first of these hypothetical readers exists in the
writer's mind as the writer's understanding of potential readers' social and
historical knowledge and experience. The second exists in the text. Shklovsky’s
and Iser’s paradigms enhanced my awareness of the original audience, of
potential LC2 readers, and of myself as a reader. This focus on audience helped
me identify counter-discursive techniques of post-colonial texts and potential
22 Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," Russian Formalist Criticism, Four
Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1965) 22.
23 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading, A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978).
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