A Study Of Defamiliarization In Thornton Wilder’s Play Our Town

Thornton Wilder is an outstanding American writer, whose Our Town achieves the highest of his playwriting. Our Town is a three-act play about an average town as depicted through their everyday lives and two families from1901to1913. This thesis will interpret the peculiarness of the play from the angle of defamiliarization by Shklovsky, and it is precisely defamiliariztion in content and form that makes it a long-lasting play.Defamiliarization in content first finds its expression in the play’s affirming American traditional values and elements of Chinese culture. In the context of the Great Depression, traditional values were questioned, while the play sings highly Puritan spirits such as democracy and equality. On the other hand, Wilder draws his experiences in China and fills the play with Chinese cultural elements. That is to say, Chinese ink-and-wash painting charms of the scenery, the vision of plain community with small population in distant past of China depicted by Lao Zi, and the Chinese doctrine of the Mean used by Wilder. Furthermore, American literature has a tradition of depicting small towns, but rare works endow daily life with cosmic significance. With unique perspective, Wilder defamiliarizes the temporal into the timeless, the particular into the universal, and the meaningless into the meaningful. Readers who lost their identities in Depression may find relief through the play.The play uses experimental dramaturgy to highlight the theme. In order to emphasize the truth of life existing in trivialities, the play adopts episodic structure with digressions rather than works on conflict or climax, and cyclical and symmetrical patterns are also evident. Wilder undertakes to shatter the surfaces of things to present the essence of the interior world, thus his method of staging here is scenic minimalism. Wilder’s most extraordinary device in this play might be the creative use of the Stage Manager, who plays the role of narrator, part-time actor, stand-in director and scene shifter. In addition, defamiliarization in sound and lighting effects also lays stress on the theme.Through analyzing defamiliarization in the play, Wilder’s philosophy and dramaturgy in his representative play Our Town can be fully explored.