What is the place of clichés in contemporary culture? In the age of predictive language models like Claude and ChatGPT, language has become more formulaic than ever, suggesting a need to revisit the cliché and its social function. Genre studies has long interrogated the cultural, psychological, and ideological work performed by the formulaic and conventional. Mary Ann Doane writes regarding visual clichés of cinema, “the cliché is a heavily loaded moment of signification, a social knot of meaning.” Though “characterised by an effect of ease and naturalness… the cliché has a binding power so strong that it indicates a precise moment of ideological danger or threat.” Doane regards with suspicion the cliché’s immediacy of signification as in service of the dominant ideology, which it naturalizes. Today, the clichés generated by AI are accused of eliminating the need for thought because of this ease of understanding. But given the word’s etymological roots in printing, its origin as a name for the stereotype block, one can also view the cliché as a kind of technology that makes thought economical. And, as in the works of John Ashbery, clichés have also been used to animate rather than deaden language and human perception. If mechanical reproduction gave rise to the cliché, how might we reevaluate its cognitive, cultural, and ideological functions in the age of artificial intelligence? What new threats and possibilities does it pose for the present? 

Possible paper topics include:

• The status of clichés in modernism and postmodernism
• The relationship between clichés and technology, including artificial intelligence
• The relationship between clichés and thought
• Clichés as “dead metaphors” and the conditions in which they might be resuscitated
• The analysis of specific clichés in literature and popular media