English Professor Russell Weaver publishes his fourth book

Once Ashland University Professor of English Russell Weaver, Ph.D., stopped taking his kids to soccer games, he started writing books.

Weaver keeps doing it because he said jokingly that it keeps him out of trouble.

“It’s also fun to do,” added Weaver, who has been teaching at AU for almost 40 years. “And it’s helped my teaching because you learn things about texts when you write about them that you can’t learn teaching them.”

On Monday, Jan. 22 in Ronk Lecture Hall, Weaver gave a presentation on his most recent book, his fourth one, “The Moral World of The Sun Also Rises.”

“A legendary teacher at AU, Dr. Weaver will share ideas from his book with the same wit and analytical acumen that students enjoy in his classroom,” said Hilary Donatini, Ph.D., chair of the AU Department of Languages and Literatures.

For the first 10 or 15 minutes of the presentation, which is open to anyone who is interested, Weaver said he will describe the book and take two of the complex passages from the text and discuss it with the audience like he would with one of his classes.

He has done presentations for his three previous books, too. They are “The Moral World of Billy Budd,” “Questioning Keats: An Introduction to Applied Hermeneutics” and “Teaching English at Ridgeview.”

“Teaching English at Ridgeview” is a little different from his other books because he writes about how a former student of his taught English at a Colorado charter school similar to the way he teaches his AU courses.

“The way that I teach is different than the way most people teach,” Weaver said. “I don’t lecture. I learned early on that was not the way I wanted to teach. I have at least four individual conferences with students with their papers.”

The way Weaver writes about text of a book is different than the way most people do, he added.

“Most people, when they are quoting the text, just quote the text and leave it,” he said. “They don’t actually say why the words mean what they mean, which, to me, is a waste of time. If you’re not going to talk about the text, why are you writing about it?

Analyzing the text is how Weaver said he has written his three other books about “Keats,” “Billy Budd” and “The Sun Also Rise,” as well as the fifth book he is working on about Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” during his study leave time this semester. He has chosen “The Moral World of …” theme to write about the text and characters in his most recent books.

“Most people have a thesis that a book is about X or Y. A book is seldom about X or Y. It’s a complex phenomenon,” Weaver said. “I go through and look for what the characters say and what their perspectives are.

“You have people who are complex who have good and bad things about them,” he added. “When I’m looking at a character, I try to discover if the text supports what the character is doing or not.”

With “The Sun Also Rises,” Weaver said he views the first-person narrator as mostly reliable.

“He doesn’t lie, but he is in love with a woman who doesn’t love him and, when he is dealing with her, he will say things to try to keep hope alive for him with this woman that are not exactly what he really thinks,” Weaver said. “He’s not lying when he is talking about going to dinner and doing other things but, when he’s talking about his feelings, you question whether what he’s saying is an accurate representation of his feelings.

“When you understand the complexities of feelings of the narrator and the other characters the book has, then the text becomes a lot more interesting,” Weaver added. “If you look at the deepest levels of what the moral perspectives of the characters are and the moral perspectives of the text is, that really makes it a rich piece of literature.”

This is how the book is described on Amazon, where the book can be purchased: A significant new contribution to Hemmingway scholarship, this book seeks to show that the moral world of “The Sun Also Rises” is profoundly unstable, and that every character can be seen as being both endorsed and critiqued by the text. This is manifested especially in Jake’s status as a partially reliable narrator, and above all in his judgment of Brett. Jake consistently hides his true feelings for Brett from the reader and from himself, as he seeks to appear in control of his life. Reading the text in this way also renders the novel’s famous conclusion less decisive than is usually assumed. This book will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates as well as graduate students and scholars.

Donatini describes it as “engaging with significant and enduring questions about a major work of American literature.”

“His incisive critical approach pays close attention to language – its intricacies, beauties and ambiguities,” Donatini added.