Reviewing strategies and the normalization of uncertain texts

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 existing aesthetic boundaries, has commercial success, and is made by a little-known creator? Along with the strategies of description, accommodation, and rejection, this paper argues that reviewers’ most effective, long-term strategy to normalize the uncertainty of a brand-new product is to come up with an aesthetic label for it, either by rescuing one (recycling) or by proposing a new one (neo-labeling). These two strategies of resignification help to normalize the product’s aesthetic uncertainty. This paper studies reviewers’ initial valuation of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. They applied the above-mentioned strategies to read the text, especially as they could not agree on its aesthetics. A key strategy consisted in recycling the little-known label magical realism. In the long-run, magical realism turned into the normal label applied to the novel worldwide. This paper offers insights into actors’ perception of uncertain cultural products and the standardization of heterogeneous interpretations of such products.