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Clichés We Live By explores the modern obsession with originality through the figure that most threatens it: the cliché. From the rise of industrial print to the age of artificial intelligence, it shows how the notion of the cliché has shaped our understanding of creativity, banality, independent thought, and the limits of human agency. Rather than treating clichés as fixed, exhausted expressions, the book understands them as constructed experiences of déjà vu – moments when language feels strangely familiar, as if we have already heard or said it too times before. The cliché is a dynamic cultural form that makes us feel the weight of the already-said.

The book examines how clichés are not only used naïvely or dismissed ironically, but are continually negotiated in literature, art, popular culture, and everyday discourse –  inhabited, twisted, and revalued within different contexts. Such negotiations reveal how speakers and writers situate themselves within the tension between convention and invention, the collective and the singular, sincerity and performance. 

The book traces how clichés have come to define what it means to be both human and modern. With the emergence of AI, in which machines learn through repetition and prediction, and as concerns about the homogenization of human discourse increase, the clichéss returns as a central mechanism. The authors reveal clichés as scorned yet indispensable – something we can’t live with, and can’t live without. 

Nana Ariel & Dana Riesenfeld
Oxford University Press 2026