VOCABULARY WORD (PHRASE) OF THE DAY:

Today’s 50-Cent Phrase: “Cognitive Estrangement”

By immersing yourself in a story, whether written or visual, you get to know the world the writer has created. When things in that fictional world differ from your understanding of how the real world works, you begin to ask questions. And you want answers. You look for an explanation of why these things are the way they are.

Literature scholars have a fancy name for this: cognitive estrangement. (Write that down; you can use it to impress your friends at parties.) Cognitive estrangement puts the reader in a world different than their own such that the reader is provoked to think about those differences and question them from a unique perspective. Cognitive estrangement is essentially literature’s solution to “can’t see the forest for the trees.” By stepping outside a situation (seeing it from another’s perspective), we detach ourselves from it and can better see it for what it is.