The Potential of Cliché

Many clichés appear in writing on clichés, but most fall into two categories. The first: cliché is the enemy of thought in general and of criticism in particular. It must be avoided at all costs, or, as Martin Amis has it, taken as the prime antagonist in a modern "war" for the preservation of the intellect.1 The second: actually, cliché is good. It invites close reading; it instructs us in the norms, beliefs, and backgrounds of characters and authors; and properly approached, it can prompt us, as Christopher Ricks writes, to analyze and rearticulate the "gulf between the way we usually mutter such-and-such a phrase and the way we might use it if the doors of perception were cleansed."2 These clichés map to the most obvious possible stances from which we write criticism: a thing is bad, or it is good; it's clarifying, but it is ripe for defamiliarization and reanimation. To invoke a cliché of our recent critical history: the object calls for paranoid reading, and therefore it calls for repair.

In this introduction, I want to try to sidestep the paranoid/reparative binary and turn instead towards a related tangle of clichés key to recent literary criticism: the personal. Clichés are a fundamentally social institution, which at the same time engage our most personal responses, and shape the personal "I" behind each articulation or critique of cliché. Clichés express the ineradicable sociality of the self, the fraught but ever-present relationship of self to society. They are "micro-institutions," sparking social affirmation and connection, and lubricating the working of communal life.3 The clichés we recognize locate us in history and culture, and the clichés we fall back on are a means of communing with common knowledge and idiomatic wisdom. At the same time, cliché prompts individual creative thought and work, and checks subsumption into an unthinking norm, in a sense that Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and others would argue is essential in resisting totalitarianism. Cliché, then, provides a ground from which to navigate and analyze both our democratically essential collectivity, and our democratically essential individuality. Today, our collective freedom to stake intellectually and politically risky positions is under threat. The defunding of state universities and the suffocating precarity of academic labor is one manifestation; the consolidation of a corporate oligarchy bolstered and enriched by extractive circulatory technologies, like the engagement-maximizing algorithms that underpin social media platforms, is another. In this context, thinking with cliché not only interrogates the forces that dominate our political and economic landscape, but possibly — through that process — encourages both greater collectivism and the individual thought that makes collectivism hum.

The Landscape of Cliché

Since the 19^th century, the story of cliché has been one of anxious critical debate. The modern meaning of cliché — a phrase or figure that is unoriginal, platitudinous, hackneyed, and evacuated of poetic resonance — originates in a metaphorical use of the French term clicher or cliquer, "to click."4 Cliché is onomatopoeic: the sound of a little metal block clicking into place in the stereotype machine. With the advent of photography in the late 19^th century, the term extended to other mechanisms, connoting mass reproduction and evoking the taint of commercialism. Cliché, with its metallic chime, was set against the values of Romanticism: spontaneity, sincerity, appreciation of nature and the originality of human creation. But each literary evolution comes with new cries of cliché, and for the early 20^th century modernists, Romanticism was a target of tropism, its lambs and swallows cast upon the trash heap in favor of impersonality and abstraction.5 Clichés moved from being associated primarily with the mechanical to being associated with frippery — the formulaic became flowery rather than mathematical. Some modernists felt that poetry must live "close to the thing," and as Ezra Pound put it, clichéd language produced instead "a sort of embroidery for dilettantes and women."6

If Romantic and modernist poets rejected cliché first as rigidly mechanically and then as tediously florid, critics soon took on the job of repairing and reanimating the figure. As the 20^th century progressed, they had their work cut out for them, both in mass culture and in a literary avant-garde increasingly preoccupied with circulating phrases and mass-produced ideas. William Empson observed that clichés are "not dead but sleeping,"7 and in the work of writers from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to David Lynch and David Foster Wallace, critics found rich opportunity for the rearticulation of cliché. Christopher Ricks' essay on cliché in The Force of Poetry is a classic of the genre. He argues that cliché is transformed through very close reading, observing for instance that George Orwell, in "Politics and the English Language," is "most alive" in the sentences in which he compiles banalities for discard: "jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot"; his combinations creating "a bizarre vitality of poetry."8 In the same essay, Ricks celebrates the "juxtaposition of elevated and banal diction" in Geoffrey Hill's poetry.9 He points to Hill's depiction of St. Sebastian in "The Humanist": "Naked, as if for swimming, the martyr/Catches his death in a little flutter/Of plain arrows."10 Ricks makes us see that "catches his death," that common reference to the common cold, is put to new and tender service as Hill depicts the Saint's ordinary vulnerability to catching a shiver of arrows. We might call this approach to cliché reparative.

Other bodies of 20^th century critical opinion are far more ambivalent about cliché's availability for defamiliarization, or indeed the value of that project. Orwell, Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt are among the most widely cited in the tradition of thinkers who have had "the unoriginal idea of trashing cliché."11 Writing in the face of European fascism and the Holocaust, all of these writers associate cliché with an unthinking adherence to social norms and an erosion of individual thought and intellectual courage. Orwell argues that cliché will "think your thoughts for you, . . . partially concealing your meaning even from yourself."12 He sees this tendency as part of a dangerous and ongoing downward spiral. English has become "ugly and inaccurate" because our thoughts are foolish. In turn, "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." For Orwell, this problem is reversible, providing we make a genuine bid for greater lucidity, for "to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration."13 Cliché, here, is a bellwether marking out the sheep herds of unoriginal thought in modern political and intellectual culture. The task of criticism then is not to enchant and enliven cliché, but to cull the flock. The good urban democratic citizen takes on this task, personally battling against cliché as they cultivate original political opinions in a hyper-mediated public sphere. The critic undertakes this endeavor professionally. If all democratic societies eventually succumb to the downward pull of mindless repetition, one indication that society is not completely doomed is support for strong, democratic institutions that enable critique, both by constituents and a professionalized class of critics.

Adorno and Horkheimer show us how foolish it would be to reduce the battle against cliché from a systemic problem to a personal one. Rather than the trash heap or the abattoir, in Dialectic of Enlightenment cliché appears in the guise of rows of hygienically identical apartments, in which the "living cells" of individual humanity "crystallize into homogeneous, well-organized complexes."14 This is cliché as an expression of "mass deception," against which criticism stakes its claims. In this sanitized social context, our attempts at individual expression are preconditioned by consumer capital and molded by the ideological apparatus of the culture industry. As Adorno and Horkheimer point out, these forces encourage personal taste: the choice of which radio show people tune into, or which movies they frequent, are simply predetermined expressions of social and income "level," for which a category of commodity has been manufactured.15 Today, we similarly find that our supposed quirks of personal taste — our choice of furnishings and books, the TV and movies we select from streaming services — dissolve all too readily into clichés of our consumer bracket. Whether we watch the new production by Marvel or A24, or choose a Colleen Hoover novel or the hot new Fitzcarraldo, does not "so much reflect real differences as assist in the classification, organization, and identification of consumers."16 One stratum of social media home décor influencer jettisons their pink 1970s bathtubs for black matte rain showers bought on Amazon Marketplace. Another protests by "adding character" to their homes, sourcing vintage credenzas from niche ecommerce sites that are themselves dependent on Amazon Web Services.17 "Something is provided for everyone," Adorno and Horkheimer write, "so that no one can escape."18

Self and System

It would perhaps be easy to read Adorno and Horkheimer's depiction of the "relentless unity of the culture industry," an expression of the "emergent unity of politics," as an indication that our attempts to distinguish ourselves within the onslaught of cliché are inevitably foreclosed.19 This sense of foreclosure is one explanation for the anxiety that attends so much critical writing on cliché. Cliché is a predictably fraught and personal topic for those who stake their self-conception on writing and writing well. Gustav Flaubert, for instance, compiled a dictionary of clichés (Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues), and considered subtitling it "Encyclopedia of Human Stupidity." The undertaking, he wrote, "gets me down and my subject becomes a part of me."20 Flaubert's discomfort is not just that clichés indicate something concerning about modern life; he feels cliché embedding itself in him, threatening his claim to critical distance from the banality that he is critiquing. Cliché lures us insistently into the realm of the personal, prompting us to individualize the systemic analysis offered by Adorno and Horkheimer. It is understandable that critics bristle against cliché as antithetical to the creative and defamiliarizing project of critique. Yet all too readily, we start to think of cliché as less a question of cultural unity than one of personal laziness and stupidity. One risk is that the resulting critique is born of personal anxiety, barely disguised by contempt — and banal contempt produces an inevitably banal response. As Katie Kadue writes, in a recent essay on Ricks: "why does contempt for cliché seem to inspire such uninspired critique?"21 Or as Ricks himself puts it: what response to cliché "could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, more outworn than outworn...?"22

C. Namwali Serpell, in her essay in the landmark 2017 collection, Critique and Postcritique, argues in fact that "criticism is cliché."23 This is the case, she points out, in the most obvious sense: criticism, whether written for academic journals or public-facing periodicals, relies on repetition and recapitulation. Texts are summarized and paraphrased, arguments are prefaced and recalled, phrases act as waypoints in the arc of analysis, repeated from countless other examples of the genre. More pointedly, though, Serpell suggests that certain forms of criticism are "all about cliché."24 The hermeneutics of suspicion, symptomatic reading, and ideology critique treat language "as a puzzling set of symptoms that are legible only to the right kind of reader." We see this kind of reading, she says, in Flaubert, Adorno, Orwell, and Arendt, who "all interpret cliché as a sign of unwitting artistic debasement, bourgeois collusion, and complicity with bad politics."25 This ideological blindness, which lies waiting to be uncovered, is "discernible to the perspicacious, informed — often Marxist — reader, who dissects the cliché and skewers its source." Paranoia leads all too readily, in Serpell's view, to the anxious trap of critical contempt, and to the self-aggrandizement of the critic. For Serpell, the solution to this narcissism is phenomenological reading. As a "signifier of non-signification," cliché's "contextual embeddedness and semantic tautology — its obscurity even under the brightest light — demands another method of reading," one that honors the material and affective affordances of cliché, rather than merely unearthing and illuminating ideology from the trash heap.26

It is true that ideology critique, like any criticism, gets bad and boring when it becomes a transparently self-serving activity, centering the myopically personal anxiety of the critic. But I want to suggest that this argument, levelled often at paranoid reading, indicts not the act of uncovering, but also the faults of an overly personal criticism. Anna Kornbluh's recent book, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism — cited often in this issue — takes up this tension between the vaunted project of critique and the enticements of a more personal mode of theorizing. One of the tasks of criticism, Kornbluh suggests, is to impose mediation on the cultural objects we use to distinguish our individuality. She argues that this function of criticism is more pressing than ever in an increasingly circulation-led economy, in which the dominant cultural style is "immediacy": a world of easeful cliché, of "demediation, immanentization, flow."27 In the realm of criticism, one of immediacy's primary expressions is autotheory. Theory should help us "fathom how dominant culture is determined by the circulation-forward base," Kornbluh writes, but autotheory turns away from ideology critique and towards "self-scrutiny and indeterminate entanglement," leaning instead into "auto-authorizing, lyrical, fragmented first-personalism."28

There are many reasons to reach for auto-authorizing self-reflection in today's alienated and exploitative critical landscape. In the academic labor market, stable, living-wage jobs are increasingly the exception, and precariously employed, underpaid scholars do the majority of teaching. The systematic underfunding of universities by state and national governments in the U.S. and the U.K., and the rationalization of academic departments in private institutions, are born of the same ideological motives.29 Cost-cutting, so-called efficiency measures, and the stripping away of labor rights to make workers fluid and disposable according to the financialized whims of institutions — these are measures for which the ground has been meticulously laid in the cultural sphere, ever-vigilant against academic "jargon" and the vanity of intellectual extravagance. Jargon, cliché's evil twin, is levelled at academics and critics to discredit and devalue intellectual work while the conditions of its production are quietly dismantled. Liberal centrist pundits, who loudly decry anti-intellectualism in its associations with authoritarianism, are more than willing to overlook anti-intellectualism as a core principle of neoliberal economic policy, which attempts to raze the landscape of critique.

In this context, it's unsurprising that critics turn to personal narratives: it's less expensive to write about yourself than to do research, which requires steady institutional support and resources. If you're trying to scrabble together articles and book proposals without library access, in between multiple adjunct teaching jobs, or in hours of daylight before your alt-ac job starts, writing from experience might look more expedient. At the same time, even a CV stacked with books and articles cannot get you a job that no longer exists. If there are no jobs and no hope of new ones arising, we might turn to the false promise that Erik Baker has mapped across over a century of Western culture: that with enough effort and charm we can "make our own job."30 If we could just exhibit our super-heroic personal qualities, we might super-heroically transcend the exploitative and unjust conditions of academic labor. These super-heroic personal qualities are expressed, surely, through the witty social media presence, the personally inflected essays and opinion pieces, the SubStack or podcast, and ultimately the work of autotheory, which makes immediate and intimate the individual critic to her readers, particularly, perhaps, those on an upcoming hiring committee.31

Reading with Adorno and Horkheimer, it's hard not to suspect that writing about oneself may become, all too easily, a self-soothing attempt to individualize oneself just enough, in a sense that we hope has not already been subsumed by the market. In this context, it is not just autotheory as a marketable publishing category that risks cliché in its generic repetitions, but the managed chaos of selfhood itself, slowly regularized across years of autotheoretical and essayistic narratives.32 At some point, writing the self might become less an exercise in forging solidarity across personal difference, and more a performance of easily consumable tropes of individuality. We find parts of ourselves reflected in these narratives, and, like the armchair produced for our particular income level and educational background, feel confirmed in our quirks, without the risk or need to challenge or critique the systems that produce and validate them.

Cliché, as a critical object, helps to illuminate our too-earnest and anxious belief in our own performances of originality. It helps us to understand why, in our cultural and economic context, we hunger to individualize, and to analyze the predefined forms that shape our process of individualization. At best, cliché can productively warn us away from both the ease of unthinking massification, and the lure of solipsistic personalism.

This issue is being published in a historical moment characterized by an increasingly technologized inhumanity: a post-truth political landscape depleted of strong institutions, and in which rigorous reporting and critical thought face an uphill battle against a for-profit media landscape populated by AI-generated content, propaganda, and misinformation. Our attention to cliché, in this context, is not just a bid for more refined thought and nuanced expression, but for humanity in the face of an obliteratingly inhuman economic and political order. Cliché marks the outer bounds of a horseshoe, inside of which lies the vibrant, contested, and urgent space of democratic activity. On one side of this horseshoe: our ineradicable sociality, which can all too easily slide into apathetic and fearful homogeneity. On the other: our ineradicable individuality, prey to a banal and terrible myopia of self-interest and self-protection. One of criticism's jobs is to burnish this curve, and to negotiate its terms. Yet the conditions that enable creative, critical human work are being stripped away. Criticism, where it can be performed, must respond to the destruction of this present with more than feeling: with responsibility to the collective, staked out by the agential self. That, at least, is the potential of cliché.

In This Issue

All the essays in this volume find rich possibility in cliché — often in artists' engagements with the banally oppressive economic landscape and oppressively banal cultural landscape that cliché betrays. Angela Allan, in "For the Love of Work: Reading for the Cliché," reads from novels by Raven Leilani and Emily Henry to consider how clichés of romance have been applied to our relationship to work. Allan observes how readily the cruel optimism that we bring to the conventions of romance apply to labor: the easeful, normative, collective promises of marriage and family, stock phrases and stock plots. Like romantic love, work promises a "more complete, fulfilled self." Unpeeling the optimistic fantasies from Henry's and Leilani's texts, Allan shows that we learn that "work should be easy to love," while "the ideology within the cliché is that one should love work, even when it is hard." She argues that reading for cliché helps us to grasp the direction of our optimism: our fantasies of work drive, in fact, towards "a desire for work to matter," in a capitalist economy that strips labor of its libidinal potential and reduces it to "a travesty of necessities."

A number of the contributors in this issue explore how cliché has been used to evade and ironize stereotypical markers of identity in the representation of characters from marginalized backgrounds. Connor Spencer, in "Cliché's Cringe: Aesthetic Judgment in Percival Everett's Erasure," observes the cringe elicited by the novel's clichéd representations of Bill, Monk's queer brother. Bill's desires are "conventionally materialistic, his self-stylization is unoriginal, and his manner of speaking is trite." He's tasteless, a problem for Monk, the author protagonist of the novel, who hungers toward aesthetic virtuosity. Yet as Spencer points out, to cringe is often to recognize our proximity to the cringe-worthy object. "What if the embarrassment of cringe, an affective response that narrows our distance from the typified object, belies an anxiety over the process of typification immanent to cliché?" Part of the critical force of cliché, he suggests, is that it "induces discomfort over the possibility that one might be reduced to a similarly circulable type."

For Siraj Sindhu, similarly, the deployment of racialized stereotypes by Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, and Kaveh Akbar, in their depiction of western Muslim characters, instigates an uncomfortable affective response that we should not, nonetheless, mistake for untruth. In "The Uses of Caricature in the Western Muslim Novel," Sindhu argues that the genre employs the "truthful misrepresentation" of caricature neither to confirm nor dispel Islamophobic stereotypes, but to "reveal the agency and processual self-realization" of western Muslim characters as they achieve complex and hybrid social identities. Kate Schneider approaches the use of cliché in representing minoritized subjects from a different angle in "Cottagecore Bob: Cliché and Queer Sanctuary in Robert Glück's Garden Writing," examining its deployment by queer artists in a bid to shield themselves from entrepreneurial performances of self. In the work of Robert Glück and Joe Brainard, Schneider finds artists leaning into cliché as a means of "earnestly inhabiting commodity culture." For Glück, she suggests, clichéd and commodified representations of identity act as a façade, behind which the writer can step to dodge the expectation that the minoritized subject nakedly perform interiority, "offer up sexual disclosures, and otherwise expend the self."

Olivia Sutherland returns us to the material and circulatory politics of cliché. In "Under the Sign of Cliché: A Lover's Discourse, A Lover's Discourse, A Lover's Discourse...," Sutherland calls our attention to cliché as a feature of intertextuality. She questions whether Benjamin's clichés necessarily lack aura: "who has not found themselves uttering a truism, not without thinking, but because they were powerfully struck by its relevance in context? . . . Who has not sensed, on some level, the auratic power of uttering those words again?" Reading from two works by Xialou Guo and Anahid Nersessian that each claim some spirit and relation to Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, Sutherland observes that their repetitions remind us of the value of theory's mediations, including the theory that begins in personal response. "Rather than dwelling in the irreducible texture of the moment (the particular text, the particular time, the particular encounter)," she asks, "isn't it more thrilling to rub our language against the other, to extend our personal writing so that it becomes more than merely personal, so it resounds in contexts beyond us?"

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Harriet Smith Hughes is a writer and academic. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford.

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Banner Image by Curology on Unsplash

References

1. Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Cape, 2001). See also Frank Kermode, "Nutmegged," London Review of Books, 23, no. 9, May 10, 2001, 27-28.[⤒]
2. Christopher Ricks, "Clichés," in The Force of Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1984), 362.[⤒]
3. Anton Zijderveld, On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 17.[⤒]
4. On the origins of the term, see e.g.: Tom Grimwood, "Cliché," in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford University Press, 2020); Tom McArthur, "Cliché," in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Jacqueline Lam-McArthur and Lise Fontaine (Oxford University Press, 2018).[⤒]
5. On this timeline, see Susan Rosenbaum, "Cliché," in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4^th ed., ed. Roland Greene et al. (Princeton University Press, 2012), 267-68.[⤒]
6. Ezra Pound, Pavannes and Divisions (Alfred A. Knopf, 1918), quoted in Rosenbaum, "Cliché," 267.[⤒]
7. "All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison." William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New Directions, 1953), 25.[⤒]
8. Ricks, "Clichés," 357.[⤒]
9. Ricks celebrates Hill using Hill's own praise of Isaac Rosenberg. Hill quoted in Ricks, "Clichés," 364.[⤒]
10. Quoted in Ricks, "Clichés," 363.[⤒]
11. Katie Kadue, "Grist for the Mill: Christopher Ricks on Cliché," in Close Reading for the 21^st Century, ed. Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant (Princeton University Press, 2025), 89.[⤒]
12. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," in A Collection of Essays (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 172.[⤒]
13. Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 163.[⤒]
14. Theodor Adorno and Max W. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 95.[⤒]
15. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97.[⤒]
16. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97.[⤒]
17. See e.g.: 1^stdibs.com, Inc., "Form 10-K: Annual Report," Securities and Exchange Commission (Fiscal year ended December 31, 2025), 20.[⤒]
18. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97.[⤒]
19. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 96. On originality and cliché in mass culture, see also Benjamin's theorization of "aura": Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1969).[⤒]
20. Quoted by C. Namwali Serpell in "A Heap of Cliché," in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Duke University Press, 2017), 160.[⤒]
21. Kadue, "Grist for the Mill," 89.[⤒]
22. Ricks, "Clichés," 356.[⤒]
23. Serpell, "A Heap of Cliché," 153.[⤒]
24. Serpell, "A Heap of Cliché," 153.[⤒]
25. Serpell, "A Heap of Cliché," 157.[⤒]
26. Serpell, "A Heap of Cliché," 165, 167. See relatedly: Ruth Amossy, "The Cliché in the Reading Process," trans. Terese Lyons, SubStance 11, no. 2 (1982).[⤒]
27. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023), 43. Kornbluh gives many examples of immediacy aesthetics, from immersive art gallery experiences to emojis.[⤒]
28. Kornbluh, Immediacy, 151.[⤒]
29. On the decline of state funding for universities in the U.S. and U.K., see e.g.: Mary Ellen Flannery, "State Funding for Higher Education Still Lagging," NEA Today, October 25, 2022; American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Public Research Universities: Changes in State Funding, September 2015; Joe Lewis and Paul Bolton, "Higher Education Funding: Trends and Challenges," House of Commons Library, July 16, 2024. On the ideological roots of the transformation of funding in U.S. higher education, see e.g. Beth Mintz, "Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 80, no. 1 (2021:, 79-112.[⤒]
30. Erik Baker, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard University Press, 2025).[⤒]
31. See Harriet S. Hughes, "The Entrepreneurial Essay," ELH (forthcoming Spring 2027).[⤒]
32. Another example in the academic marketplace: the academic job application. A somewhat more degrading version of the university application essay, the academic job application requires the writer to navigate just the right amount of personal cliché, entrepreneurial optimism, and supposed novelty and individuality.[⤒]