Cliché

Saint-Simon disait de Fénelon qu' « [i]l fallait [faire] effort pour cesser de le regarder 1 . » Mais que voit-on désormais dans les peintures du Télémaque ? Que peut-on, ou plus exactement, qu'a-t-on encore envie d'y voir ? Parue en 1717 chez Jacques Étienne, sa première édition conforme au manuscrit original s'ouvrait sur un frontispice puissamment dramatique, où, par la grâce d'un dispositif iconographique des plus identifiables, Claude Duflos avait gravé un portrait de l'auteur en Vérité dévoilée par le Temps. Mais, s'agissant du Télémaque, le temps n'a-t-il pas, en réalité, joué la partie inverse, et concouru à l'offuscation de ce qu'il était censé révéler ? À quelques exceptions près, le siècle dernier dans son ensemble ne s'est guère montré sensible aux divers tableaux de la narration fabuleuseet guère davantage, à vrai dire, à la narration fabuleuse elle-même : soit que son clichage lui ait paru en exténuer la tension mimétique, soit que sa fonction de miroir, et de la Sagesse et du prince, se soit fait trop sensible, voire trop irritante, à son goût, pour ne pas opacifier et compromettre le charme de ses peintures. Fénelon définissait l'éloquence par sa capacité à peindre et par là-même à toucher : la dévaluation du peintre est donc allée de pair avec celle de l'écrivain, faisant du Télémaque aujourd'hui un chef d'oeuvre en péril, et de sa patine une forme de patinoire, où l'oeil semblerait désormais condamné à glisser.

Since the birth of modernity, Western thought has been at war with clichés. The association of philosophical and cultural integrity with originality, and the corresponding need for invention and novelty, has been a distinct concern of a whole spectrum of ideas and movements, from Nietzsche’s polemics against the ‘herd’, the ‘shock of the new’ of the artistic avant-garde, the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture, to Orwell’s defence of political dialogue from ‘dying metaphors’.

This book is the first examination of the cliché as a philosophical concept. Challenging the idea that clichés are lazy or spurious opposites to genuine thinking, it instead locates them as a dynamic and contestable boundary between ‘thought’ and ‘non-thought’. It unpacks the constituent phenomena of clichés – repetition, the readymade, same-ness – through readings of ‘anti-philosophical’ thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sloterdijk, and Groys, within sites of the cliché in practice: memorial poppies, cinematic reboots, art installations and more.

Rejecting the idea that clichés should be dismissed out of hand on normative frameworks of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ thinking, or ‘new’ and ‘old’ ideas, it instead interrogates the material, cultural and archival ground on which these frameworks are built.

Forma + naturaleza = entidad "
La acción dramática es como un rio que fluye constantemente a pesar de los codos, giros y piedras hacia el mar de la unidad donde su objetivo se sacia.

Sobre la Sombra, la Coma en la actuación.
Los límites oscuros, las griteas de la cocina teatral, que roban presencia al intérprete, dándole una moral, convirtiendo en Solemne (estructura basada en Limites prohibitivos), lo que es mejor que sea simplemente Serio (Estructura basada en puntos de partidas para la exploración)

Joseph Roths Roman Radetzkymarsch wurde und wird immer wieder unter dem Aspekt des Mythischen gelesen. Die vorliegende Arbeit liefert daher eine ausführliche Zusammenfassung der Rezeption des Radetzkymarsch unter dem Aspekt des Mythischen; darauf folgt eine Darstellung und Kritik an Claudio Magris‘ Mythenmodell in "Der habsburgische Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur" (1966) – das in der Rezeption des Romans besonders viele Spuren hinterlassen hat. Das Kernstück der Arbeit bildet schließlich der Versuch einer Anwendung des Mythos-Konzepts, das Roland Barthes in Mythen des Alltags (1964) entwickelt hat, auf den literarischen Text. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf der Untersuchung des Solferino-Kapitels – als einer im Romanzusammenhang bedeutenden Erzählung von der Entstehung eines Mythos – sowie der spezifischen Verwendung des Pronomens "man" im Radetzkymarsch. Die Schwierigkeiten der Protagonisten zum eigenständigen Denken und Handeln zu finden, die sich unter anderem im Einsatz dieses Pronomens in Verbindung mit erlebter Rede ausdrücken und ihre starke Bindung an die Großvätergeneration wird anhand einer Analyse der Rolle, die Bilder – Photographien wie Porträts – im Roman spielen, untersucht. Die Wiedergabe der Gedanken und Meinungen der Figuren in erlebter Rede insbesondere unter der Verwendung von "man" ist ein Einfallstor für eine spezifische erzählerische Ironie, die sich im Radetzkymarsch beobachten lässt. Das Stilmittel der Ironie – das im Roman oft in der Verbindung mit dem literarischen Klischee auftritt – wird im zweiten Teil der Arbeit untersucht. Diese erzählerische Ironie ist in vielen Punkten analog zum Sekundär-Mythos bei Roland Barthes strukturiert und bildet wie dieser daher ein Gegengewicht zu mythologisierenden Tendenzen. Die Funktion der Ironie Bedeutung zu ‚verkünstlichen‘ – während der Mythos sie dagegen ‚naturalisiert‘ – kann an einem der Höhepunkte des Romans gezeigt werden.

A term deriving from the sound of the mechanical printing process able to provide cheap and fast reproductions of literary works, the cliché is at once both a foundation of modern culture, and its constant adversary. Denoting a lack of originality, thought or effort, clichés appear to be the very opposite of literature’s aspirations, and there is no end to the warnings for writers to avoid them at all costs. However, few theorists have spent sustained time detailing the workings of the cliché, outside of criticising their use. Indeed, the cliché seems to resist being thought about too much. At the same time, this resistance to theory can also obscure a range of issues that the cliché raises as a problem for literature. Unpacking these problems suggests that the cliché is not simply an issue of unoriginal thought, but arises from, and is perpetuated by, a number of tensions within the production and circulation of writing itself. These include tensions between artistic worth and literary ownership; between organic creation and technologies of reproduction; between localised communications and universal truth; and concerning the status of the intellectual in relation to the masses, and the place of authenticity in late-modern culture.

A montagem é uma operação mencionada com recorrência nas reflexões sobre cinema, literatura e fotografia, mas pouco presente quando se discute desenho. Apesar disso, a montagem lhe é fundamental. No desenho, elaboram-se as partes simultaneamente à sua disposição no campo compositivo. A produção (que entendo como reprodução, explicarei adiante) dos fragmentos ocorre ao mesmo tempo em que eles são dispostos e articulados entre si. Nessa forma de edição, as marcas das emendas confundem-se com a própria estrutura das partes. Partes formadas pela aproximação (ou distância) que mantêm entre si. Tal dificuldade de identificação trata menos do resultado de uma intenção dissimulante do que de uma derivação da própria natureza promíscua do meio gráfico.

"Winnie’s clichés can be understood in terms of the linguistic structuring explored by Lacan. Like other Beckettian characters, Winnie has not been inscribed in the retroactive mechanism that instates meaning, and allows a subject to appropriate signifiers in a dialectical way. The latter are monopolized by the Other, excluding any subjective expression. The redundant meaning in clichés thus gives form to a mortal abyss.
"

El análisis literario permite distinguir la presencia de una voz femenina por toda la obra de Manuel Puig. El personaje que la expresa en Cae la noche tropical es Nidia. Desde el enfoque de la crítica genética fue posible observar en los materiales escriturales la configuración de esa voz y su relación con los lugares comunes —rasgo ya señalado como recurrente en la poética de este novelista por la crítica literaria—, así como el proceso por el cual logra fugarse del rol esperado y el cliché.

Football is often celebrated as a global language. No less global, though considerably less celebrated, is the plethora of football-specific clichés which make up the language of commentary, post-match interview and expert analysis. Often mocked, but rarely seriously analysed, the very ubiquity and persistence of these clichés suggests that their use is rather more than simple linguistic ‘laziness’ on the part of pundits and players. We propose that the footballing cliché is in fact an integral thread in the broader fibre of modern football itself, a demonstrably functional feature of the everyday footballing lexicon, and is therefore worthy of investigation in its own right. After all, it’s important to take each game as it comes. In order to explore the ordinary world of clichés in football, we will draw on the expertise of two philosophical pundits of our own: Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) and (the later ) Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

This article poses the question of what analytical insight can be gained by comparing ritual and cliché, both of which involve evaluations of the significance of repetition. The case study is kava-drinking sessions in indigenous Fiji. Whether purposeful or casual, kava-drinking sessions always follow rules which give them significant form and regularity of the kind some anthropologists consider definitive of ritual practice. Yet many indigenous Fijians criticise present-day kava-drinking sessions for several reasons. One prominent line of criticism is that kava drinking is now a matter of too much repetition-too many people drinking too much too often-and losing the meaningful link to chiefly tradition as a result. Analysing criticism of ritual in terms of cliché clarifies situations in which the iconic force of repetition is treated as an index of excess.

One hand we are unique, every one of us. This uniqueness manifests itself visually in the face, first of all. At the same time it is also in the face, we carry the same features and senses, which belong to all of us: eyes, nose, ears, smell and touching (touching is everywhere, but the thin skin of the face makes it especially touching).

If we see a lot of selfies, we will see a lot of faces. On one hand unique, on the other stereotyped. They are not only stereotyped because of features mentioned, put because we tend to seek the same expression, which is the currency right now.

It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive as well as restrictive imaginaries about peoples and places. This article presents a conceptual framework for the study of tourism imaginaries and their diffusion. Where do such imaginaries originate, how and why are they circulated across the globe, and what kind of impact do they have on people’s lives? I discuss the multiple links between tourism and imagination, illustrating the overlapping but conflicting ways in which imaginings and fantasies drive tourists and tourism service providers alike. By applying this conceptual approach to international tourism in developing countries, I illustrate how the critical analysis of imaginaries offers a powerful deconstruction device of ideological, political, and sociocultural stereotypes and cliche´s.

Este artículo desea incursionar en la poética de subversión que caracteriza la construcción de personajes en la obra cervantina, y ello a partir del análisis del episodio de Manuel de Sosa Coitiño en el Persiles. El estudio examina dos procesos paralelos e interrelacionados a los que el soldado portugués fue sometido: la deificación de su novia Leonora y el proceso de su construcción a partir del estereotipo del enamorado portugués. Según intentaremos demostrar, Cervantes ha creado un personaje cuyos rasgos estereotípicos se ven desestabilizados en el contexto del episodio. El examen de dicho fenómeno podría esclarecer la actitud crítica del autor ante uno de los tópicos más populares de las letras del Siglo de Oro español.

Le cliché est un élément de la littérarité du texte et le signe d’un travail poétique à deux niveaux : il est présent comme outil rhétorique, que l’on va remodeler, et comme sujet d’une réflexion sur la poésie.
Outil, il est la plupart du temps combiné à d’autres clichés et lieux communs. Si dans l’univers amoureux, cette combinaison construit simplement une isotopie, soulignant bien l’immédiateté et la banalité du cliché, le genre polémique fait de lui le signe d’une contestation des lieux communs, non plus parole répétée d’un autre, mais signe d’une énonciation personnelle. La réception du cliché autorise alors plusieurs lectures possibles. L’univers héroïque propose quant à lui de répéter le même cliché et construit ainsi une forme de regroupement qui exhibe et multiplie les figures contenues dans le cliché.
Parallèlement à ces jeux de dispositions macrostructurelles, le cliché, comme figure, fait l’objet d’un renouvellement permanent: ses composantes passent par des déplacements multiples : aux transferts habituels (syntaxiques et sémantiques) s’ajoutent la transposition générale d’un genre poétique à l’autre, d’une énonciation à une autre, ou partielle, des sens, des matières convoqués par les vocables du cliché. On ne perd pas pour autant la nature du cliché : le sens instantanément compris est inscrit dans une combinaison certes renouvelée, mais utilisée chez d’autres poètes. On a alors à faire à un cliché secondaire, redevenu banal quoique né d’un cliché renouvelé.
Ce travail rhétorique, syntaxique et poétique sur le cliché aboutit à sa convocation dans les vers comme sujet d’un discours métapoétique : signe de l’imitatio, il s’inscrit dans une volonté de renouveler les genres et les pratiques poétiques et refuser pillage et plagiat. Les mythologismes et les images de la tradition pétrarquiste sont alors dénigrés au nom d’une poésie libre, personnelle et simple de l’imagination, désireuse de retrouver dans les figures, leur origine imaginaire et matérielle. Simplicité, liberté, figuration et imagination dont d’autres clichés sont justement les porteurs. Le cliché est ainsi le lieu d’une poésie paradoxale qui le déforme, le dénigre et lui redonne sa force figurative, imaginaire et littéraire.

This article takes as its point of departure what Bataille calls the “nauseating banality” that flowers are both symbolic of everlasting love and comically short-lived. The comparison of women to flowers in early modern lyric, already by the sixteenth century veering into the territory of cliché, often explicitly thematized—rather than trying to gloss over—the proximity of flowering to withering, a proximity highlighted by the French equivalents of those words, fleuri and flétri. In both Petrarchan and carpe diem traditions, female figures were both essential and essentially expendable. Even the most conventional love poems failed to stay on this side of garbage, as wispy images of women became disfigured into decaying organic material in the space of a single sonnet. Focusing on poems by Pierre de Ronsard and Robert Herrick, I show how these very different poets were engaged in the same misogynist cultural project, a project that takes as a premise that the smooth transition of women from vibrant matter to rotting trash is remarkable in its unremarkableness. These poets, I argue, approached the woman-flower trope with a desire and disdain comparable to their sentiments for the women their poems represented. Viewing women as neither invitingly immediate nor ethereally inaccessible, treating their bodies as dead weight or garbage rather than as property of any value, these poets used the timeless ephemerality of both women and cliché to negotiate their own ambivalence to poetry and immortality.

« Il serait possible d’écrire un livre entier sur toutes les images diverses, alternativement somptueuses et tragiques, splendides et sombres, qu’a suscité le Mexique dans l’esprit et la sensibilité de nombre d’auteurs français. », écrivait Octavio Paz. Le Mexique, sa culture, ses cultures, ont toujours animé la curiosité des esprits français : des premiers récits rapportés par les voyageurs européens jusqu’à l’actuelle emprise des médias sur sa réputation, il a une place bien spécifique dans l’imaginaire français. Positives et négatives, balancées entre fascination et dialogues interculturels enrichis, exotisme, clichés et stéréotypes, les représentations de cette culture font l’objet de l’étude ici présentée.

Everyone HATES cliches, yet EVERYONE-every Tom, Dick and Harriet-uses them. This paper explains why we should hate the damnable things, and at the very least, use them less. For those who love cliches, you will hate this paper. For those who hate cliches, as any red-blooded philosopher should, you will also hate this paper because you will come to realize just how often you actually unwittingly (truly lacking in wit) fall into cliche, thereby contributing to the devolution of language and thought-that is, to the downfall of humanity. There will be a brief opening ode to cliche in the context of epistemology where we consider the possible efficacy of these otherwise pernicious tropes. But this will be perfunctory indeed, and we will quickly jump to the evisceration of the cliche and the cliche-monger. That would very likely be YOU. So, let's get this ...show ...on the road. 1

Publicado en  http://revistalaboratorio.udp.cl/investigacion-14/

Este artículo propone analizar las articulaciones entre estereotipo y crimen en cuatro cuentos de Silvina Ocampo, siguiendo la hipótesis de que el crimen se hace presente en estos cuentos como la contracara del ideal de " felicidad " convencionalmente establecido en ciertos rituales sociales, para romper con la cristalización. El carácter ambiguo del estereotipo, que implica, por un lado, el doble sentido del cliché – literal y metafórico– y, por otro, la ambigüedad semántica de los lugares comunes en la oscilación entre la norma y la excepción llevarían al desenlace fatal denunciando la petrificación del sentido común.

Abstract
This article analyses links between stereotype and crime in four stories by Silvina Ocampo. I hypothesize that crime is present in these stories as a counterpart of the ideal of " happiness " conventionally established in certain social rituals, to break stereotypes: the ambiguous nature of stereotype, which involves, on the one hand, the double meaning of the cliché –literally and metaphorically– and, on the other hand, the semantic ambiguity of common places and the oscillation between rule and exception, would lead to fatal end which denounces the petrification of common sense.

According to a thesis with supporters in a wide range of disciplines – philosophy, psychology, theology, literary studies, and others – narrative is crucial to human self-understanding and self-representation. Many readers of Hannah Arendt view her as an important champion of this thesis. For Arendt, they claim, political life can only truly be represented in narrative form. When Arendt witnesses the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, however, she confronts an individual fatally oblivious to the demands of a genuine political action who is nonetheless capable of producing stories. In fact, Eichmann is an avid storyteller, at work on his autobiography. Arendt is therefore forced to conclude that storytelling does not necessarily entail any realization of what it means to be a political, i.e. an acting human agent. ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ contains an implicit theory of the ‘banality of narrative’, the ability of established and hackneyed storytelling templates to block the narrating subject's recognition of the unpredictable interactions of multiple, diverse human beings. When Arendt famously analyses Eichmann's obtuse reliance on clichés, she is not speaking only of isolated phrases, but of entire plots that impose a spurious order on human lives.

This chapter investigates early tourist discourse (1875-1914) on the Netherlands through material of mostly British, German, and Dutch origin – travel brochures from Thomas Cook, the Vereeniging voor Vreemdelingenverkeer (VVV), and the Centraal Bureau voor Vreemdelingenverkeer, as well as guidebooks and travel writings. It traces the emergence of commercial tourism to the Netherlands by bringing together earlier forms of leisure travel to the Netherlands and the discovery of the Netherlands as a place worthwhile visiting by painters and writers of the Romanticist movement. In tourist discourse, information is linked to the advertising or purchase of a service or commodity – a travel arrangement, a postcard, or a souvenir. These commodities serve as mediators for experiencing the visited country; hence other visual media of consumer culture are investigated as well (advertising trade cards, picture postcards). Images in tourist discourse and consumer culture mostly use the form of the cliché, regardless if these images were produced by Dutch or foreign people. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Dutch reactions to the cliché, which calls for rethinking the divide between self-image and outsiders’ image.

visual culture; consumer culture; tourism; visual media; nineteenth century; twentieth century; cliché; self-image and outsider’s image; landscape painting; Romanticism; Picturesque

S'intéresser aux phénomènes de réappropriation à partir de la littérature, et plus généralement de la création artistique, c'est interroger les liens complexes établis entre le monde et l'art.
Il s'agira d'étudier le processus de distanciation et de détournement à l'oeuvre dans son travail, afin de comprendre comment l'artiste parvient paradoxalement à « faire oeuvre » à partir d'une démarche négative d'épuisement des significations.

The concept of the cliché occupies a place at the periphery of our critical vocabulary. Reviewers, critics, editors, and teachers of composition frequently speak of clichés, but dictionaries of critical terms and handbooks of literary and cultural studies almost never provide entries on the word. This paper asks whether pointing out clichés can be seen as a form of critique or whether it is just quibbling, and how we draw the line between serious scrutiny and mere pedantry. It further suggests that complaints about clichés are often used to mark subtle breakdowns of communication, moments in which the reader or listener feels disrespected. Such a view of the cliché goes some way toward uncovering its neglected rhetorical and political dimensions.

This paper draws on Ian Bogost’s argument that video games constitute a form of ‘procedural rhetoric’, in order to re-examine the representation of heroic madness in First-Person-Shooter games. Rejecting the idea that games attempt to recreate the experience of madness to the player through linear representation, the paper instead identifies two persistent commonplace figures which appear within the genre: the monstrous double, and the reaching tentacle. While Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric allows analysis to move away from the more facile interpretations of gameplay, the paper argues that these figures also demand an account of the commonplace itself – the rhetorical ‘topic’ – which links the technical structure of gaming procedures with the tropes and figures that enable them to make sense within their wider cultural context and tradition. While the figures of the double and the tentacle purposefully draw on existing tropes and processes associated with the cultural meanings of mental health, a rhetorical analysis of their use of commonplaces suggests that they are not simply recycling older clichés, but constitute a creative ‘reobjectification’ of madness.

I propose that clichés in film can be classified according to the context in which they manifest themselves. In the film image is possible to observe the incidence of three types of clichés, they are: formal, within the mise-en-scène; semantic, articulating the film montage and narrative, organizing the dramatic structure. This proposal takes into account that the creation of the screenplay, beyond its demands regarding the technical field of dramaturgy and formal field of film narrative, are poetics mediated by a symbolic repertoire present in the imaginary, which are recovered in the act to fable. The appeal for originality therefore arises as an ideal increasingly unattainable, since the expansion of shared imagery repertoire engenders a kind of collective audiovisual memory. Thus, understanding the process of creating film images in its correlation with clichés, can lead to new approaches about the creative process of film images, in particular, the fable making of screenplays.

“She wanted to shield her, from the bullet of an ordinary life.”

—Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park

I believe, perhaps counterintuitively and certainly masochistically, that a good film or TV show should make you feel profoundly banal. It should not transport you or give you hope that dreams come true. It is the role of avant-garde television to make you understand that you are a cliché, that there is truly nothing remarkable about you, that no one will tell your story, that everyone has been wounded and only some wounds are worth watching.

Such is the case with Sharp Objects, Jean-Marc Vallée’s miniseries that premiered on July 8 on HBO. Coming off the extraordinary success of Big Little Lies, Vallée brings us another murder story mixed with a biting comedy of manners, this time with a healthy dose of Lana Del Rey Americana. Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) has escaped her stifling, socialite mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson) and the small town of Wind Gap, Missouri, to become a reporter in St. Louis, only to be sent back to cover the murder of two young girls.

The story is one that has been told countless times — a woman with a dark past returns home to confront traumas internal and external. To say that Sharp Objects is innovative would be an exaggeration, but this is exactly my point. So unapologetically does the series embrace the hackneyed traditions of crime shows (especially those starring women) and melodramas that it becomes something discomfiting that dares us to love it despite our entrenched desire for that wink-wink that tells us it is all a joke.

The irony never comes. In this way, the sincerity of Sharp Objects denies any such markers of highbrow enjoyment and instead provokes a hysterical need to chase the impossible — to become that booze-swigging, chain-smoking, windows-down-tunes-blasting woman with a traumatic secret you have seen so many times onscreen. Sharp Objects reminds us that some people have their lives immortalized onscreen, but those people are only characters. We can never approach that freeing artifice.

Les mèmes d’Advice Animals représentent des animaux et des humains qui incarnent des clichés comportementaux, exprimés par des discours renforcés par les titres (mèmonymes) et la décontextualisation de l’image originale. Bien que ces mèmes contiennent des énoncés inscrits dans des genres délimités (conseils, microrécits personnels, parodies…), ils les remettent en question : le conseil est malveillant, la parodie ne fait que reprendre les paroles de l’autre. Les archétypes ne suivent pas non plus les règles établies, ni pour les mèmes animaliers ni pour les stéréotypes humains : le cliché animal se renouvelle par contradiction, et l’évocation des stéréotypes sociaux s’accompagne de leur décomposition.

This article asks the question: how do we learn about good and bad, or effective and ineffective, higher degree research (HDR) supervision practices, and about the institutional and disciplinary expectations that define them as such? I suggest that cliché, gossip, and anecdote are central to this education. In different ways, these speech genres both circulate knowledge about supervision practices and help to form social relations and approaches to knowledge integral to effective supervision. This acknowledgment is significant for discussions about formal training programs for HDR supervision. It addresses both who is presumed to be the subjects of formal supervision training (what, and how, do they already know?), and the wider contexts and processes of learning about supervision into which formal programs intervene.

The conduct book stakes out the boundaries of correct behavior, making instructions for self-management available to anyone who strives for easy social integration. Given its close relation to the mores of the educated classes, it is a rather unlikely genre to employ for the misanthrope looking to repudiate society. Yet in a series of articles in 1905/06 in his journal Die Fackel, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus alluded to this genre, sharpening its rules to the point of absurdity as a means to completely close down rather than facilitate societal exchange. In Kraus’s etiquette, bad manners come to include all manners. The study of this little-known project enables us to understand Kraus’s obsessive preoccupation with clichéd speech as a critical response to the pathologies of communal life around 1900.

Noting the persistent imagery of overuse and exhaustion that surrounds the concept of the cliché, this paper argues that linguistic statements can suffer from a “tragedy of the commons,” according to which a shared resource will inevitably be spoiled by a community in the absence of constraints on use. Each verbal cliché is the result of a tragedy of the commonplace, the overexploitation and depreciation of an initially valued and widely used expression. The measures often taken to avert overexploitation of the commons – privatization and government intervention – fail to work in the case of overused phrases, since language cannot be divided up for the exclusive use of particular individuals and the repetition of statements cannot quite be censored just because it produces tedium. The tragedy of the commonplace reveals the radically social and un-ownable character of language.

A constant tension in the production of horror – whether in film, novel, video game, or even real life – is how it negotiates clichés of the genre. For, while Eugene Thacker rightly notes how horror and philosophy are related through the motif of an ‘unthinkable world’ which brings to fore the threshold of our understanding,  such a threshold is coloured by repetitious and well-known tropes and motifs. Indeed, in a world saturated with images of horror, repetition itself becomes a key trope for expressing the limitations of our thought.  In this live lecture, I consider this through John Dowdle’s 2014 film As Above, So Below, which follows its protagonists as they pass through a series of (literal) thresholds within the Paris catacombs. The film’s repetitions of both horrors (e.g. Dante’s Inferno) and clichés (e.g. the found footage format) allow us to consider what threshold or limit may exist between the two, or whether there is a case to be made that horror has a more fundamental – and perhaps more concerning – relationship to cliché.

La tolerancia, el mejor regalo de la mente 8 en la opiniÓn de... Cliché, entre lo falso y lo real 10 nbc nius Actividad de grupos ciclistas de todo México 14 reportajes Fixed, Trial y BMX 20 urvanidades Llegan nuevas marcas a México 21 de paseo La semana de la bicicleta 30 ¡Weblogs! Date vuelo con más páginas para cultivar tu adicción a las cletas 31 núm3ro5 Algunos récords impuestos por ciclistas extrovertidos 32 sprint 9º Popobike 2013 36 la prueba Dahon Boost 44 abicidiario Straps 45 biciletras La máquina y el hombre

La pensée du cliché est indissociable d’un geste critique, qui en fait l’envers de l’originalité : ressassés, usés, signes de paresse intellectuelle, les clichés désignent dans la langue la puissance du commun. Au-delà d’une condamnation expéditive, qui génère elle-même ses propres clichés (des clichés il faut toujours se défaire), nous proposons ici d’analyser en détail les raisons de la critique, en prêtant une attention particulière aux apports de deux théoriciens du style, Antoine Albalat et Rémy de Gourmont. Ces deux auteurs ont participé à la condamnation du cliché de manière constructive, fournissant listes, éclairages linguistiques, mais aussi une « philosophie du cliché » (R. de Gourmont) qui met en regard les automatismes de la mémoire et la qualité particulière des images portées par les clichés. La confrontation de leurs analyses permet de renouveler la problématique du cliché et de penser l’efficacité et l’évolution particulière de ces images, que l’on présente d’ordinaire comme figées.


The thought of the cliché is inseparable from a critical gesture, which makes it the opposite of originality: outdated, worn out, signs of intellectual laziness, the clichés designate in the language the power of the common. Beyond an expeditious condemnation, which itself generates its own clichés (clichés must always be discarded), we propose here to analyze in detail the reasons for the criticism, paying particular attention to the contributions of two theorists of the style, Antoine Albalat and Rémy de Gourmont. These two authors participated in the condemnation of the cliché in a constructive way, providing lists, linguistic insights, but also a "philosophy of the cliché" (R. de Gourmont) that compares the automatisms of memory and the particular quality of the images carried by the clichés. The confrontation of their analyses renew the problem of the cliché and put light on the particular evolution of these images, which are usually presented as fixed.

Alex Prager’s willingness to provide something for everyone makes her one of the most generous contemporary artists. She combines technical skill and compositional precision with the beautiful thematics of film noir or melodrama. Perhaps above all Prager uses photography and film to excavate the inner lives of individuals – some of whom we recognize, but most are anonymous faces in the crowd. Nowhere is this more potent than in Prager’s commission for Times Square’s Midnight Moment, in which her short film Applause plays every night at 11:57 PM during the month of June. A sea of people clap across the enormous electronic billboards, and one is filled with exhilaration and fear. Every time we get up in the morning and step outside, after all, we are performing for somebody – why not get the recognition we deserve? Or is there freedom in anonymity?

Зеленин А. В., Руднев Д. В. Канцеляризм ‘а равно (и)’ и его история // Русская речь. 2022. № 3. С. 79–91.
Zelenin A. V., Rudnev D. V. A Bureaucratic Cliché A RAVNO (I) and Its History. Russian Speech, 2022, 3: 79–91.

Канцеляризм а равно (и) был одной из многочисленных союзных единиц с корнем -равн- (равно как (и), равно (и), равным образом (и), равномерно (и) и др.), возникших в русском языке XVIII века в результате калькирования немецких наречий и наречных сочетаний с корнем -gleich- (gleichals, gleichfalls, gleichwie, gleicherweise, gleichergestalt, gleichermassen и др.), способных употребляться в качестве присоединительных союзов. Новые союзные единицы были приметой книжной речи - научной, художественной, эпистолярной и в том числе деловой. С 1730-1740-х гг. они начинают употребляться в распорядительных и законодательных документах правительственной власти. Благодаря присоединительной семантике равно, равно как, равномерно, равным образом легко соединялись с частицей и, образуя союзные конструкции. В деловой речи происходило сращение новых единиц (как с частицей и, так и без нее) с присоединительным союзом а, унаследованным из синтаксиса допетровских документов. Новые союзные конструкции а равно (и), а равномерно (и), а равным образом (и) начинают распространяться в документах в конце 1760-х гг., с самого начала имея канцелярскую окраску. В начале XIX века союзное сочетание а равно (и) получило широкое распространение не только в деловой письменности, но и иных типах письменных текстов, отражая усилившееся влияние деловой речи на другие речевые системы русского языка. Однако с конца XIX - начала XX века началась жанрово-стилистическая дифференциация союзной единицы а равно (и). В настоящее время а равно употребляется в законодательных текстах и имеет яркую канцелярскую окраску, тогда как а равно и, благодаря отчетливому присоединительному оттенку частицы и, употребляется не только в деловых, но также в научных, публицистических и художественных текстах.

The bureaucratic cliché a ravno (i) ‘as well as’ was one of the many conjunctive units with the root -ravn- (ravno kak (i), ravno (i), ravnym obrazom (i), ravnomerno (i), etc.) that arose in the Russian language of the 18th century as a result of calquing German adverbs and adverbial expressions with the root -gleich- (gleichals, gleichfalls, gleichwie, gleicherweise, gleichergestalt, gleichermassen, etc.), capable of being used as cumulative conjunctions. New conjunctive units were signs of book speech - scientific, fictional, epistolary, including documentary texts. From 1730-1740s, they began to be used in government administrative and legislative documents. Thanks to their cumulative semantics ravno, ravno kak, ravnomerno, ravnym obrazom easily connected with the particle i and formed conjunctive constructions. In business speech, there was a fusion of new conjunctive units (both with the particle i or without it) with the cumulative conjunction a inherited from the syntax of pre-Petrine documents. New conjunctive constructions a ravno (i), a ravnomerno (i), a ravnym obrazom (i) began to spread in documents at the end of the 1760s and from the very beginning had a bureaucratic coloration. At the beginning of the 19th century, the conjunctive combination a ravno (i) became widespread not only in documentary texts, but also in other types of written texts, reflecting the increased influence of business speech on other speech systems of the Russian language. However, from the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the genre-stylistic differentiation of the conjunctive unit a ravno (i) began. Currently, a ravno is used in legislative texts and has a prominent bureaucratic nuance, while a ravno i, thanks to its distinct cumulative meaning due to the particle i, is used not only in business, but also in scientific, journalistic and fiction texts.

In order to point to a way out of cliché-filled discourse, we must first better understand it. Specifically, we need to address the cliché’s success – its appeal for both speaker and listener and its effects on them. Therefore, in the first section, I examine the cliché as a particular speech act, emphasizing its performative function and modern character. Drawing on literary and sociologist examinations of clichés, and mainly on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s distinct form of speech, I claim that unlike the common view of  the cliché as a worn-out and ineffective phrase, it is actually quite successful in creating consent, quieting conversation and thought, and in providing the speaker with a unique sense of  elation. Moreover, I show that the use of  clichés is symptomatic to modernity. After establishing the traits and effects of  the cliché, I show in the second section that education is uniquely susceptible to an extensive use of clichés due to some of its inherent structural tensions, and finally, I return to Arendt’s report of Eichmann’s trial, to suggest that her unmethodical critique could prove useful in confronting the challenge of  regulated and repetitive speech.

The paper concerns the rhetorical basis in works of French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who was a prominent representative of the Enlightenment. In the early twentieth century L. Hautecœur has revealed literary devices that are used by Greuze in his paintings, but then scholars have not focused attention on this issue. In the opinion of the author, many of Greuze’s works were  modeled  on  the  rhetorical  syllogisms  that  were  described  as  far  back  as  the  Classical  antiquity.  Using  Aristotle’s  division  of  rhetorical  sentences  into  common  and  specific  topics  or enthymemes, he reveals in the work of the French painter representative samples of both. Greuze’s favorite commonplace was the antithesis and other «figures of speech» closely related to this rhetorical topic, and he used it very variously, contrasting each other as whole pictures and images within a work, and these oppositions, in turn, have very different degrees of contrast.  One  of  the  most  famous  specific  enthymemes  created  by  Greuze  is  the  iconographic  cliché which is at the core of his very popular «expressive heads» — «têtes d’expression». Both kinds of figures of visual rhetoric found understanding and reflection in Russian culture of the 18–19 centuries, particularly in Russian literature.
Статья  посвящена  риторической  основе  творчества  французского  художника  эпохи  Просвещения Ж.-Б. Грёза. Л. Откёр еще в начале ХХ в. выявил литературные приемы, которые Грёз использовал в своей живописи, но в дальнейшем эта тема не привлекала внимания исследователей. По мнению автора статьи, многие работы Грёза созданы по  правилам  риторических  силлогизмов,  описанным  еще  в  Античности.  Используя  разделение  Аристотелем  риторических  высказываний  на  топосы,  или  общие  места,  и  частные  энтимемы,  удалось  выявить  в  творчестве  французского  живописца  характерные образцы тех и других. Его излюбленным общим местом было противоположение и иные тесно связанные с этим риторическим топосом «фигуры речи», причем Грёз использовал его чрезвычайно многообразно, противопоставляя друг другу как целые картины, так и образы внутри отдельных произведений, и эти оппозиции, в свою очередь,  очень  различны  по  степени  контраста.  Одной  из  наиболее  известных  частных  энтимем, созданных Грёзом, является иконографическое клише, лежащее в основе его весьма  популярных  «головок»  —  têtes  d’expression.  Оба  вида  фигур  изобразительной  риторики нашли понимание и отражение в русской художественной культуре XVIII–XIX вв., в частности в отечественной литературе.