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The term New Criticism which arose from Eliot’s Theory of Impersonality in Art defines the critical theory that has dominated Anglo-American literary criticism for past fifty years. It is a ‘New’ approach because it completely ignored context and the author’s background. The critic doesn’t know anything about the writer and studies the work of art solely based on the merit of language. One is required to look at the text in isolation and reject authorial intent as well as biographical or sociological interpretations. In order to bring the focus back to analysis of the texts, New Critics aimed to exclude the reader’s response, the author’s intention, historical and cultural contexts and moralistic bias from their analysis. The New Critics called authorial intent as ‘intentional fallacy’ and a reader’s subjective response as ‘affective fallacy’ and thus were quick to eliminate these aspects while critically analyzing a text. The school of New Criticism and Russian...

Samuel Beckett, the most eminent Irish playwright wrote ‘’Waiting for Godot’’ in French in 1949 and then translated it into English in 1954. This play has been performed as a drama of the absurd with astonishing success in Europe, America and the rest of the world in the post second world war era. For this reason, Martin Esslin calls it, “One of the successes of the post-war theatre” (Esslin, Martin, 1980) In this play, the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait expectantly to see a man simply known as Godot, a character who does not make an appearance in the play, despite being the titular character. The play begins with waiting for Godot and ends with waiting for Godot. Marxism refers to the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis of communism. Marxism introduced ideas such as Dialectical Materialism, Alienation, and Economic Determination. Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ has a minimalist setting...

Critically analyzing Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ with respect to Russian Formalism.  According to Russian formalism, any work of literature can be read as a form oriented work. It should be of an autonomous domain, in an enclosed universe and not related to extrinsic systems. To a Russian formalist, form and meaning are inseparable and no literary work is insignificant. We are going to employ techniques like close reading, de-familiarization, construction of language, structure and the Boris Tomashevsky approach to analyse the play Waiting for Godot with respect to Russian formalism. Russian formalists majorly look into the structure of a literary work as one of its key critical components. The play is divided into two acts with identical action and setting. The almost identical acts suggest a repetitive cycle which continues throughout the play. Waiting for Godot is a tragicomedy play of an absurdist nature containing a dominant theme of existentialism. Being an a...