What is literary strangeness? It is common for critics to talk about defamiliarization, which is how art forces us to pay attention to things we become habituated to. However, this is part of the bigger category of literary strangeness, by which writers like Shakespeare and Henry James make us aware of tacit knowledge.  Strangeness is a way for literature to explore the tacit, implicit way in which we know each other and know the world: the things we don't always know that we know, or how we know. One justification for the humanities, therefore, is that strangeness makes us aware of how tacit much of life really is. So much of life cannot be understood explicitly: the world is too strange, too vast for us to be able to know it all.