J. G. Carter Troop, M. A

              1917
J. G. CARTER TROOP, M.A.
Late Professor of English Literature in the University of Chicago (1898–1912)
Offers a Series of Lectures on


Figure


Copyright by Underwood & Underwood

DRAMATIC AND NON DRAMATIC LITERATURE ENGLISH, RUSSIAN AND AMERICAN

For terms and dates, address
J. G. CARTER TROOP
316 West 56th Street   New York City



AS a public speaker, Professor Troop's experience has been large and varied.  In part it has been gained in fourteen years' Extension lecturing in connection with the University of Chicago, during which period he delivered on an average 150 public lectures and addresses every year, and in more than half of the States of the Union.  Since the autumn of 1912 his lecturing has been chiefly in the Eastern States.  In the season of 1915–16 he gave in New York City and Philadelphia alone over eighty lectures.

Professor Troop's lectures are neither read nor memorized.  Having a genuine aptitude for the platform and a talent for dispensing pleasure as well as instruction, his lectures are not conventional, cut and dried discourses weighted with stiff academic drapery of definition.  In general they are spontaneously adapted to the needs of this or that particular audience.  The message underlying the lectures is the cultural value of books of power, the inspiration and sheer pleasure derived from their perusal, the practical value of general ideas, and the need of being interested in ideas as such and for themselves; in short, the social significance of great literature.

Professor Troop has an inborn gift for public speaking.

He is a man whose merit equals his reputation.

He is finely equipped both by education and experience for the public platform.

Professor Troop has an attractive personality, a beautiful voice, a strong sense of humor, and a fascinating delivery.

Professor Troop's language is clear-cut, precise, forceful, expressive.  The brevity of his sentences is the result of the effective use of simile.

As a lecturer he has made a unique place for himself, and is of consequence in his chosen field.  He is in touch with the centre of things.




MASTERPIECES OF RUSSIAN FICTION
Russia's literary gift to the world is a very great gift.  In Russia alone among the countries of Central and Eastern Europe the novel has developed with a radical originality.  The great European War has aroused an unparalleled interest in the Kingdom of the Czar, the ethics and social and political ideals of which are imperfectly understood in America.  It is through reading Russian fiction that we are best able to realize the life and thought of Russia.  The aim of this course of lectures is to give the required guidance for this reading, as well as to venture an interpretation of the Russian point of view.


I.
Pushkin and Gogol:
The Mozart of Russian Literature and the Russian Dickens.

II.
Ivan Turgenev:
The Prose Vigil of Russian Literature: He who first brought Europe into contact with the Russian Soul.

III.
Feodor Dostoyevsky:
He who reveals the greatest adventures and the deepest experiences which the soul can undergo.  The bearer of a message divine.

IV.
Count Leo Tolstoy:
A great artist and prophet, but withal a child with the child's terrible simplicity and insight.

V.
Anton Tchekhof (Chekhov):
The painter of the middle class and the Russian Intelligentsia.  He who brought back to Russian Literature the touch of humor little present since Gogol.

VI.
Maxim Gorky:
The Russian Kipling—with a difference.  A Teller of Tales of the Bare Foot Brigade





THE DRAMA OF TODAY AND THE NEW POETRY
The chief literary characteristic of the present age is the revival of the Drama.  Professor Troop lectures on the leading English, French, and American Dramatists.  The Irish Playwrights are included.  The new interest in poetry is also a marked characteristic of the times.  Lectures are offered on the newer writers of verse as well as on Noyes, Masefield, etc.



THE NOVEL OF YESTERDAY AND TODAY
The prominence in literature of the novel is still marked and promises to continue indefinitely.  Nothing threatens its leadership except the growing vogue of the printed play.  Lectures are presented by Professor Troop on the greater novelists of the Nineteenth Century from Scott and Jane Austin to Robert Louis Stevenson, with special lectures on The Development of the Novel and The Short Story.  Novelists of today include Wells, Bennett, Conrad, and the late Henry James.



AMERICAN LITERATURE
Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Cooper, Washington Irving, Poe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain.



SHAKESPEARE
To commemorate the Tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare fourteen special lectures are offered on the Life and Times of Shakespeare and his greater Comedies and Tragedies.



Professor Troop is a lecturer who is always in such perfect good humor, always so urbane, that it is a delight to listen to him.  His wit always strikes the right way.

He is both wise and witty, and seems to have an inexhaustible supply of illustrative material stored in his memory—literary, philosophical, scientific.

He treats his subjects sympathetically and in a popular, attractive way, but as a scholar knows them.  He distils the best books, and serves up the quintessence of wisdom.