Description
clichés We Live By shows how clichés - those everyday phrases we love to hate - shape our world. It traces their trajectory from modernity to the contemporary digital and artificial intelligence eras, revealing their pervasive presence and their paradoxical nature as both banal and profound. The book historicizes the clichés situating its emergence in modern print culture, and offers the first comprehensive roadmap of theoretical perspectives, proposing an integrative approach. Drawing on philosophy of language and rhetoric, the authors treat clichés as events in time, defined less by objective repetition than by a subjective impression of triteness. Like déjà vus, clichés evoke a visceral sense of "here we go again," interpreted variably by users and receivers. Viewing them as negotiable constructs, the authors explore their manifestations in popular discourse and literary works: through self-conscious endorsement, repetitive hoarding, creative appropriation, and celebratory embrace. The book also examines the interplay between clichés and AI language models, highlighting their shared characteristics as statistical, collective, and curiously ownerless forms of language. AI simultaneously relies on and challenges clichés, raising questions about the boundaries of human and machine-generated banality and originality. Far from being trivial, clichés emerge here as dynamic cultural forces we inevitably live by.
Table of Contents
Stating the Obvious: An Introduction to Clichés1 A Short History of ClichésThe Origin of "Cliché" and the Rise of Homo-Originalis Common Places: The Pre-History of ClichésClichés Go Digital, Digital Goes Cliché2 A Roadmap to Cliché CritiqueClichés From A to Z: Dictionaries and Lexicographers Normative Approaches: The Trial against ClichésHow to Do Things with Clichés: Functional Approaches The Paradox of Cliché-Critique and Beyond3 Clichés between Convention and EventConventions and Kairos: The Place and Time for Clichés The Pseudo History of ClichésThe Case for New Clichés4 Cliché EventsEndorsing: Self-Admitted Clichés and the New Sincerity Hoarding: Cliché Floods, Piles, and Repetitions Recreating: Unoriginality and Uncreative Writing Celebrating: Neo-Clichés and MemesThe Grey Areas of Clichés - Conclusion5 Clichés and Artificial IntelligenceThe Imitation Game: Performative Understanding"Attention Is All You Need": Educating the Machine Against Clichés Clichés as Shibboleth: AI and Identity DistinctionFrom Homo-Originalis to Homo-Mimeticus and BackArtificial Clichés and the New(ish) Turing Test: A Temporary ConclusionHow We Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Exploring Clichés: A Dialogical Afterward AcknowledgmentsBibliography
