Literary Significance and Reception
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was received with varied criticisms: "Neil Schmitz, in an essay on Reed's fiction in Twentieth Century Literature (Apr. 1974), judged Yellow Back Radio to exhibit a “simplistic” focus and “diffused” energy, although many readers found it to be a comic tour de force."
- "Ishmael Reed is a most talented humorist and possessor of a powerfully antic and lyric imagination...Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down should be read as hard evidence of Reed's uncommon talent." The New Yorker
- "Ishmael Reed has mastered the vocabulary of blasphemy. He skins all our sacred cows." Life Magazine
- "Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a full blown 'horse opera,' a surrealistic spoof of the Western with Indian chiefs aboard helicopters, stagecoaches and closed circuit TVs, cavalry charges of taxis." New York Review of Books
Read more about this topic: Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)