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 not a static phrase but a dynamic cultural form that makes us feel the weight of the already-said.

The book’s focus is not on clichés used completely naïvely or dismissed ironically, but on those that 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. In the age of AI –  when machines learn by repetition and prediction, and concerns about the homogenization of human discourse are rising –  the cliché returns as a central mechanism. Scorned yet indispensable, we can’t live with them, and we can’t live without them. 

Nana Ariel & Dana Riesenfeld
Oxford University Press 2026