Forgetting Faulkner...and Then Remembering Again!

I have never read a Faulkner novel, but I lied when I said I had never read any Faulkner ever. I have read "A Rose for Emily" probably twice over the course of the last five or six years...and I believe, after further thought, that I have read "Barn Burning" as well (not by choice, however). "A Rose for Emily" alone was enough to convince me that he was a little bit of a strange writer. Also, I recall from "Barn Burning" that his narrative style was unique and a little hard to follow. That was a basically the only baggage I had about him until last semester, when I was privy to some slightly rambling discussions about the novels being read in preparation for the class (When Sigma Tau meetings went on tangents, as Sigma Tau meetings have a tendency to do). And, frankly, it sounds weird. Especially As I Lay Dying (something about lugging a dead body around the country?). I'm starting to think that, in addition to his fascination with the Old South, Faulkner also had a fascination with death. I have heard a lot about his complexity, his uniquely hard-to-understand style, and his long stream-of-consciousness narrative that skips around all over the place and apparently will do its very best to drive us all insane by May. I keep hearing parallels being drawn--Faulkner and Shakespeare/ Picasso/ Pound, Cubism, Faulkner vs. Mitchell (and GWTW), The Civil War vs. WWI vs. the Vietnam War--and I'm interested to see where some of those lead us. I'm hoping it doesn't lead me to an ultimate dislike of his work, since I tend to put Faulkner in the same general category as Hemmingway and Steinbeck, neither of whom I am particularly fond of. So, I guess I'm coming into the class expecting it to be weird, and difficult, and sometimes kind of awful, but I'm intrigued nonetheless.