boundary 2 was founded to break literature from New Critical formalism

Evidence

Its creator, William Spanos, decided to found the journal as a result of his shock at US collusion with the Greek Junta, while a visiting teacher at the University of Athens. He later explained that ‘at that time, “Modern” meant, literally, the Modernist literature that had precipitated the New Criticism and the New Criticism which had defined Modernism in its own autotelic terms’. In Athens he sensed ‘a kind of complicity’ between this established orthodoxy, in which he had been trained, and the callous officialdom he was witnessing. On returning to America, he conceived boundary 2 as a break with both. At the height of the Vietnam War, his aim was to ‘get literature back into the domain of the world’, at a time of ‘the most dramatic moment of American hegemony and its collapse’, and to demonstrate that ‘postmodernism is a kind of rejection, an attack, an undermining of the aesthetic formalism and conservative politics of the New Criticism’. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 51

Categorization

• XREF: Doctrine of literary autonomy echoed in Jameson’s critique of formalist New Criticism as ideology — direct precursor to the ‘political unconscious’
• QUESTION: How exactly did Spanos’s Athens shock convert into an editorial program — and why did the journal later drift away from this political founding impulse?