A Tentative Analysis Of Modern British And American Drama From The Defamiliarization Perspective

British and American plays see their prosperous age during the second half of the 20^th Century. Some representative playwrights, influenced by Brecht, apply the "defamiliarization" technique to their plays. This paper intends to justify the use of defamiliarization in plays by resorting to theories in semiotics, biology, psychology and so on, and to explore ways and means in creating defamiliarized effects as evidenced in modern British and American plays.In the first part, the author of this thesis gives a detailed explanation of the theoretical origin, the definition as well as the present development of defamiliarization. In the second part, the author attempts to justify the theory of defamiliarization by the employment of interdisciplinary approaches such as semiotic, psychological and biological. In the third part, this paper explores the defamiliarization techniques as reflected in the use of language, then, in the fourth part, tries to prove the dramatic effects created by defamiliarized artistic devices. Finally, the author briefly forecasts the prosperous future of the defamiliarization application in both literary creation and literary criticism.