objective correlative

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

—T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems"

defamiliarization or ostranenie

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

—Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 1917, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by L.T. Lemon & M.J. Reis, (U. of Nebraska Press, 1965, p12)

mentally prepared

It is fine to be mentally prepared at every moment that every object and every being shall bring to you some new revelation.

—Rudolf Steiner

common object

The common object is the sphinx, whose riddle the contemplative poet must solve.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

physical object

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are merely symbols—spring to life and we have the resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Borges’ Norton Lectures at Harvard, HUP, 2000)