There was almost no struggle between the Formalists and the Academicians, not because the Formalists had broken in the door (there were no doors), but because we found an open passage-way instead of a fortress." (Boris Eikhenbaum, "The Theory of the Formal Method'", Ö ¸ ¶ ¶ÞÊ ®Ê ¼ÃΕ ½ÎÄÅ 'Ã Û ·). Though the formalists did not deny that art had a relation to social reality they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic's business. So what they care in literary criticism is just form not the content which has certain relation with social reality. The most severe criticism of formalism comes from Marxism. Trotosky remarks that the form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines.
New Criticism.
While Formalism was prevailing in Russia, there arose a similar literary movement in Europe and America, the New Criticism. New Criticism shares something with Russian Formalism; it keeps literary form as the only proper target of literary criticism.
For most of the New Critics that job is practical criticism or "close reading," in which the poem or literary text is treated as a self-sufficient verbal artifact. By careful attention to language, the text is presumed to be a unique and privileged source of meaning and value, sharply distinguished from other texts or other uses of language (particularly scientific language). Accordingly, the meaning of the poem is not conveyed by any prose paraphrase and is valued as the source of an experience (for the reader) available in no other way. For this among other reasons, opponents of the New Critics have frequently charged that they ignore history, ideology, politics, philosophy, or other factors that shape literary experience. While such charges are not entirely fair, they arise because New Criticism in practice came to focus almost exclusively on problems of interpreting individual texts.