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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...

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...