Clichés We Live by: From Modernity to AI

By Dana Riesenfeld and Nana Ariel

Clich s We Live By shows how clich s - 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 clich s 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 clich s as events in time, defined less by objective repetition than by a subjective impression of triteness. Like d j vus, clich s 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 clich s and AI language models, highlighting their shared characteristics as statistical, collective, and curiously ownerless forms of language. AI simultaneously relies on and challenges clich s, raising questions about the boundaries of human and machine-generated banality and originality. Far from being trivial, clich s emerge here as dynamic cultural forces we inevitably live by.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0197809537
• ISBN13: 9780197809532
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"