Allegorizing individual experience is common in American, not just Third World, literature

Evidence

If we replace the idea of the ‘nation’ with that larger, less restrictive idea of ‘collectivity’, and if we start thinking of the process of allegorization not in nationalistic terms but simply as a relation between private and public, personal and communal, then it also becomes possible to see that allegorization is by no means specific to the so-called Third World. While Jameson overstates the presence of ‘us’, the ‘national allegory’, in the narratives of the Third World, he also, in the same sweep, understates the presence of analogous impulses in the US cultural ensembles. For what else are, let us say, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Ellison’s The Invisible Man but allegorizations of individual – and not so individual – experience? — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 182

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reverses the national-allegory thesis from chapter 2 of this same book; the Pynchon/Ellison/Wright/Rich counterexamples are the payoff of the earlier dismantling.