Benjamin McEvoy

Essays on writing, reading, and life

The Vision for Hardcore Literature

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I’ve sketched out my goals for Hardcore Literature before, but I want to get better at giving you a behind-the-scenes look.

So here are a few things I’m thinking about for the direction of Hardcore Literature until the end of the year. 

The Vision for Hardcore Literature

The podcast had a good first season, and I’ve learnt a lot about public speaking, show research, editing, and podcast production that I’ll be taking into season two and beyond.

We’re almost done with the Aristotle’s Virtues series:

And I’ve kicked off the beginning of a new series to replace the fun of running themes explored in the Aristotle shows.

The new show is called ‘The Psychological Significance of the Classic Myths’.

Here’s a rough look at the programming schedule for that series:

  • Daedalus and Icarus
  • Narcissus and Echo
  • Apollo and Daphne
  • Diana and Action
  • Pyramus and Thisbe
  • Perseus and Andromeda 

Another series in the pipeline is going to be called either ‘Short Story Deep Dives’ or…

‘Let’s Deep Read Great Short Stories Together’.

I’m currently editing the first episode of that one, which covers Chekhov’s ‘Volodya’.

We’ll also look at stories by Ray Bradbury, Guy de Maupassant, Alice Munro, Ivan Turgenev, and more.

The premise behind the show is basically us reading the story together but taking breaks along the way to do deep dive analysis, Hardcore Literature style, making the poetic practical.

This will be available in video and podcast form, and I’ll include the actual stories printed with timestamps for those who want to jump straight to the analysis. More robust materials will be available down the line.

We’ll also be doing a series where we look at different essays by Montaigne and connect them to other great essayists (like Thoreau, Seneca, Horace). He’s the father of the modern essay and deserves deep attention. 

What else?

Well, plenty of Shakespeare.

I’m reading and analysing every single one of Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order and will be providing a VIP section with resources for those wishing to deep dive in a similar fashion.

Perhaps we’ll make a monthly/play-based book club Skype/Zoom/Google Hangout Group.

Perhaps we’ll even read the plays together in Zoom style, divide up the parts, and have a blast.

If that’s the sort of thing you’d be interested in, let me know. My email is ben@benjaminmcevoy.com 

I’m also putting out an informal call for podcast interview guests.

I’ve drawn up a dream-team list of people I want to talk to (translators, poets, writers, directors, teachers), but I also welcome anyone to get in touch.

The only requirement is you have a passion to discuss a work or body of literary work. If you have something you want to promote on the backend (e.g. a book, a website, product, your own show), then all the better! 

I also need to do more with the newsletter.

I’m currently in an intimate email group with ~15 friends and each week we provide the group some reading, taking turns to pick something for our own syllabus, including the poem or prose or whatever in the email with a little commentary. We’re creating our own literary canon and I so love this idea – why not scale this? 

There will also continue be many disparate analyses of great works of literature on the Hardcore Literature Podcast, but I’d like to point out that there will be two distinct pathways you can choose to travel down (or venture down both):

  • The Modern Masters Fiction Series
  • Deep Reading The Classics

The Modern Masters Series will focus on deep reading pulp, or what we commonly call popular fiction.

I’ve already kicked this off with Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, and we’ll continue with works by writers like Stephen King and Caleb Carr.

Popular fiction is ripe for deep reading and analysis.

It’s a shame so few do it.

The Classics Series will continue with works by Aristotle (we’ve covered his Ethics, now let’s read the rest of his oeuvre), Plato, Homer, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Hugo, and more.

These will function on two levels. There will be a meta-level, sans spoilers. E.G. ‘How to Read War and Peace: A Guide’, and then there will be longer overarching multi-episode novel commentaries. 

We’ll also do lectures and focused video courses here and there on how to write and how to read synoptically (philosophy, poetry, history, etc) and how to appreciate different art forms. And there will be guides on how to create your own elite university educational syllabus, how to create your own digital library and learning fortress, and lots more on note-taking and synthesising information.

If you’ve read to this point, it means you’re likely interested in all this stuff.

So I’d like to say thank you for paying attention!

If you have a moment, let me know what you’d like to see/listen to.

And I’ll always be supremely grateful for any reviews left on iTunes because that tells me to keep making more shows.

Comments

    • Ben McEvoy says

      Thank you for your interest! I’ll definitely be putting one together soon! Shall keep you posted 🙂