Calvino nails it:

"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty--that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."
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Calvino nails it:

"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty--that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."
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Een pak droger dan ik verwacht had.
Calvino schreef de lezingen maar overleed net voor hij ze ging geven. Dat draagt waarschijnlijk bij aan de uitstraling van het boek en de lezingen zelf. Calvino probeert 6 essentiële zaken uit literatuur aan te raken (uiteindelijk zijn het er 5, de zesde lezing ging hij ter plaatse schrijven) die moeten meegenomen worden naar het volgende millennium. Zes zaken waarvan hij vindt dat literatuur ze beter kan dan enige andere kunst of communicatievorm.
Ik had de inhoud universeler verwacht en ben dus niet helemaal objectief. Calvino graaft zich en en werpt zo een licht op zijn eigen schrijven en literatuur in het algemeen. Boeiend, en soms erg goed aangetoond, of dan weer verrassende verbanden boven gehaald.
Maar soms evenzeer wat te droog of academisch naar mijn zin. (dat ik naar het einde toe passages oversloeg is niet echt een goed teken :) ) ( )

Calvino's lectures, prepared but not delivered late in his career, are just as thought-provoking as his fiction. He discusses some key, broad aspects of literature, and his personal discoveries of certain propulsive forces in writing. His discussion of Multiplicity I found most interesting, and the way he categorized encyclopedic and plural texts. It will certainly aid your understanding if you are already familiar with Flaubert, Gadda, Balzac, Ovid, Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Mann, Goethe, Poe, Borges, Calvino, Leopardi, Eliot, Joyce, Perec, da Vinci and more, but familiarity is by no means required for enjoyment. Skillfully, Calvino ropes in the work of all of these authors, outlines their methods in some measure and suggests how precisionism or autodidacticism or lightness and suggestion led into the completion or success of the work. By handling a wide range of styles and general approaches, Calvino offers a splendid viewpoint of artistic achievements of the mind.

There are many quotes, especially from the Zibaldone, which could have used some condensation. But it is easy to see how Calvino's own work, such as If On a Winter's Night, Cloven Viscount, Baron in the Trees, Nonexistent Knight, Invisible Cities, Palomar, Cosmicomics and other books, were inspired by literary predecessors, and he even reveals the sparks of intuitive imagination that led to their shape and form. ( )

Ocho esquemas de ideas y reflexiones ( )