Abstract
Reviewers help ease cultural products’ testing transition from the stage of production to that of circulation. Given their intermediate position between stages, reviewers have to deal with uncertainty when valuating new cultural products. How do reviewers in a transnational setting make sense of a novel product that challenges prevailing aesthetic boundaries, has commercial success, and is made by a little-known creator? Along with the strategies of description, accommodation, and rejection, this chapter argues that reviewers’ most effective, long-term strategy to normalize the uncertainty of a brand-new product is resignification, namely to come up with an aesthetic label for such product, either by rescuing an existing label (recycling) or by proposing a new one (neo-labeling). Whether as recycling or neo-labeling, the resignification strategy helps normalize the product’s aesthetic uncertainty. This chapter studies reviewers’ initial valuation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, an uncertain novel upon publication. Reviewers applied the abovementioned strategies to valuate this novel, especially as they could not agree on its aesthetics. In this novel’s case, a key resignification strategy consisted in recycling the little-known label magical realism. In the long run, magical realism turned into the normal label applied worldwide to the once uncertain novel and this label facilitated the novel’s successful adoption by consumers globally.
I am … waiting for readers to tell me
that [One Hundred Years of Solitude] is shit.
—Gabriel García Márquez (quoted in Santana-Acuña 2020, p. 130)
This is the extended version of an article originally published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9, 269–292 (2021). Reprinted with permission from Springer Nature.
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Notes
- 1.
The concept of aesthetic liberation builds on McAdam’s (1982) cognitive liberation. Aesthetic liberation refers to a group of creators that during a specific period becomes aware of their collective agency and purposively intervenes in large-scale cultural processes. This is, I argue, what a group of writers did during the rise of the New Latin American Novel in the 1960s.
- 2.
The paperback revolution is traditionally associated with the proliferation of well-printed and affordable books on many subjects in post-World War II England. Such revolution, which remains understudied in Latin America, reached readers there in the 1960s.
- 3.
After the novel sold out its first print run of May 1967 and since initial reviewers were enthusiastic, by May 1968 the publisher had released six print runs, changed the book’s cover, and redesigned the back cover, adding strong blurbs by leading writers Fuentes, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa, who praised the novel as a major literary achievement but said nothing about it being a magical realist work.
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Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter from María Angélica Thumala Olave, Jenny Rodríguez-Peña, Juan Moreno Blanco, and the anonymous reviewers of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
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Santana-Acuña, Á. (2022). Reviewing Strategies and the Normalization of Uncertain Texts. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_10
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