[in part derived from Ger. verfremdung, "estrangement" or "alienation," after dramatist Bertolt Brecht's concept of verfremdungseffekt] the effect brought on by the reader's realization that the setting of a text (film, etc.) differs from that of the reader's reality, especially where the difference is based on scientific extrapolation, as opposed to supernatural or fantastic phenomena.
- 1972 D. Suvin On Poetics of SF Genre College English (Dec.) № 372/2: In the following paper I shall argue for a definition of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement.
- 1979 G. Graff Literature against Itself № 99: The "radical disorientation" of perception and the "cognitive estrangement" discovered by recent critics in the conventions of science fiction may result in a dulling of the audience's sense of reality.
- 1987 P.K. Alkon Origins of Futuristic Fiction № 230: By placing an account of the French Revolution after a series of fantastic episodes [...] Les Posthumes is well designed to achieve the effects now described as cognitive estrangement.
- 1996 P. Alkon Cannibalism in SF G. Westfahl, G. Slusser & E. Rabkin Foods of Gods № 150: This story offers rich possibilities for symbolic interpretation but little invitation to that cognitive estrangement by which readers are invited to reconsider their own situation from the radically alien perspective of a depicted or implied alien environment.
- 2003 F. Mendlesohn Intro. E. James & F. Mendlesohn Cambridge Companion to SF № 5: Cognitive estrangement is the sense that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the reader's experienced world.
