I’ve just read all the posts from the first deadline and wow: I’m really impressed with the rigor of your reading and writing on this very challenging text. Many of you are already writing at a very high level; all of you are putting out admirable effort both as reader and writers. I could have shouted out nearly any of the authors/posts, so high was the quality, but this time I’ll give special commendation to:

• William’s rather creative post, which started with a bit of misdirection (his father’s story about almost dying from whiskey and exposure) and ended with an argument that the “primal scene” of the novel (Freud’s term) is not the Caddy-with-dirty-drawers moment, but the moment when Caddy appears veiled at her wedding.
• Roberto’s post about the word “apotheosis” in the text. It’s one of Faulkner’s favorite words, and Roberto shows how it resonates broadly throughout TSAF, especially thorugh the way the dream of unity under the sign of God (or the Devil, for that matter) gives way to the shattering reality of dissociation and death.
• Deborah’s riff on smell in “Benjy,” which conjures up, for me at least, the way Faulkner links himself to Proust and other modernist writers interested in sensation and memory in this section of the novel.

None of these is perfect, whatever that would mean, and no one should look for a cookie cutter to use for these assignments. But all three share the quality of finding something specific in the text to hone in on, something that is “weird” enough to make us read the text in a new way.