Shklovsky's Dog and Mulvey's Pleasure: The Secret Life of Defamiliarization

Abstract

SINCE THE 1975 PUBLICATION of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in the sixteenth volume of Screen, Laura Mulvey's essay has become perhaps the most frequently cited and anthologized article in contemporary film criticism.' Although Mulvey claims in the article that her conclusions are specific to the medium of film and to the conditions of its consumption, she herself soon expanded her work's application, and now, nearly twenty years later, it is a standard item in the repertoire of literary criticism dealing with gender. Mulvey herself appears rather in awe of her article's success. In the introduction to a 1989 collection of articles entitled