I, too, found myself looking for undercurrents of direct similarity between Song of Solomon and the selections we read previous to this one. With each book up to this point, there seemed to be in common with all of them some sort of stylistic choice being made by the authors that I didn’t see in SOS, and it’s been something I’ve been struggling to put my finger on. Many posts have already mentioned identity and naming issues regarding the books’ characters, and it may be an interesting excercise in class to hold these characters’ names (and maybe their relationship to what they "signify"?) up to some of the theoretical approaches we’ve applied to the previous books. But Morrisson deals with these naming issues early and often in the text (I think of the early conversation about the naming of Pilate, which was such an apparent exercise in erasing the meaning behind it that it was impossible not to suspend traditional associations with not only this but nearly every other character), so much so that I could only think of the characters’ names as inverse, role-playing tags in what is a long, involved allegory.
It may also be that this novel, more than the ones that we read preceding it, dealt with social conditions over pinpointed decades of "real" time (as opposed to the time-shifting trajectories of The Lathe of Heaven or The Female Man) that causes the rift between the narrative aesthetic between this and the previous books. I’d be interested to discuss issues of chronology and social evolution in relation to character development.
I’ve also been looking at some crtitical approaches to this text to try and find a linking element between this and the books we’ve read leading up to it, and have been hard-pressed there as well. I’ve found some interesting mythological comparisons (Milkman=Icarus), but unlike critical approaches Pynchon, Whitehead, etc., excercises in which the themes and aspects are pulled through an explicit postmodern-theorist’s filter are thin if nonexistent. Interested to see what the class discussion will focus on.