The Cliche in the Reading Process

Amossy, Ruth; Lyons, Terese

doi:10.2307/3684023

Cited by 17 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Nevertheless, we can only begin by agreeing in some sense on some posit as settled for all practical purposes. In this way, the status of the posit as a cliché has been discussed, for example, in Ruth Amossy and Terese Lyons’ (1982) work on its economising function in discourse as doxa and in Jakob Norberg’s (2010) valuable reading of Arendt’s use of the cliché as part of her method for analysing Eichmann’s speech. In these cases, the provocative character of the cliché in challenging or unsettling the convention is emphasised as a beginning and to some extent as an end, inviting us to engage the imaginative infrastructure of the cliché that remains to be developed.…”

Section: The Greetingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The border between intimacy and anonymity in innocuous action: The greeting as a social form

Blum

2015

Journal of Classical Sociology

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In response to Freud’s notion that large things reveal themselves in small indications, this article analyses the greeting as a social form, using the resources of classical sociological theory and particularly the works of Simmel and Durkheim. The focus in not upon external aspects of the content studied, say, the difference between war as a macro-event and coquetry as a micro-event, nor on the social organisation of the event as an orderly phenomenon, but on the collective representation and its unstated configuration of layered meanings that discloses a tension in modern life around the enigma of acknowledgement. The example allows us to bring together a focus on language and embodiment through analysis of the gesture. In particular, the greeting raises the problem of the ambiguous relationship of intimacy and anonymity that haunts modernity. The method is illustrated through an analysis of the cliché as a circuit of commonplace representations and then traced as a narrative to disclose its form as mirroring a fundamental problem for the social actor’s relationship to the gesture of acknowledgement as a problem of self-worth.

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Section: The Greetingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The border between intimacy and anonymity in innocuous action: The greeting as a social form

Blum

2015

Journal of Classical Sociology

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“…: 187). Drawing on Amossy (1982) and Amossy and Rosen (1982), Dufays distinguishes between different modes of processing clichés recognized as such in relation to the degree and forms of distance from them exhibited by literary writing. Thus the analysis of stereotypes and clichés in the reading process shows how literary communication can complicate our ways of understanding and appropriating common knowledge and beliefs.…”

Section: Doxa In Reader-oriented Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the Study of Doxa

Amossy¹

2002

Poetics Today

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Greece, the notion of doxa as common knowledge and shared opinions haunts all contemporary disciplines that put communication and social interaction at the center of their concerns. To be sure, the specific term is not always used: doxa appears under various guises, such as public opinion, verisimilitude, commonsense knowledge, commonplace, idée reçue, stereotype, cliché. Broadly speaking, however, all that is considered true, or at least probable, by a majority of people endowed with reason, or by a specific social group, can be called doxic. Whether the Greek term is explicitly mentioned or not, the functions of doxa in social life and in verbal exchanges have been the subject of continuous inquiries, if not of sharp polemics, for the two last centuries. In this domain, francophone literary and linguistic theories, from Gustave Flaubert's studies to Oswald Ducrot's pragmatics and to Chaïm Perelman's ''new rhetoric,'' offer important insights. They seem to have explored the question in two main directions. The first, rooted in the modern consciousness of banality, carries to a paradoxical extreme the obsession with accepted ideas, trite expressions, and (bourgeois) stupidity. In this perspective, doxa is a major obstacle to individual thinking and creativity as well as to genuine communication; as such, it constitutes a source of alienation. This approach is masterfully exemplified by Roland Barthes's essays, widely drawing on Flaubert's heritage. The second direction, going back to ancient rhetorical sources, unveils the constructive functions of doxa and its multifold uses at all levels of human communication. This is the position

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“…It originally referenced an industrial technique and its associated concept of repetition was thus intrinsically linked to the development of mechanical reproduction (Norberg, 2010). As Ruth Amossy (1982) notes, before this, repetition was less associated with the idea of overuse and its accompanying negative connotations, and more with the accepted use of stock examples to tell stories. To be alert to cliché thus supposes a move away from the previous 'canonical use of tropes' to a 'dichotomy between Creation and Imitation, Originality and Banality, the Individual and the…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

The ‘standardization of catastrophe’: Nuclear disarmament, the Humanitarian Initiative and the politics of the unthinkable

Considine

2016

European Journal of International Relations

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This article reviews the recent Humanitarian Initiative in the nuclear disarmament movement and the associated non-proliferation and disarmament literature. It argues that this initiative, rather than being a transformative moment in nuclear politics as claimed by supporters, instead fits into a long history of nuclear politics as the politics of 'rethinking the unthinkable' and, as such, is located not only within the long-established institutions of international society, as realist critics claim, but also within the long-established and limiting forms of speech of international society. The article questions the limitations of the dominant framing of nuclear weapons as 'unthinkable', and claims that focusing on the seemingly trivial matter of the prevalence of cliché in this discourse actually reveals a deeper problem of the limits of this approach. In doing so, the article shows how the problem of standardised, repetitive ways of speaking, reliance on 'nukespeak' and dominant tropes of nuclear speech identified in much of the literature is not that of the somehow innate 'unthinkability' of nuclear weapons, but that this 'unthinkability' and the associated 'unspeakability' of the nuclear are rhetorical frames that limit the possibility for political change.

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The Cliche in the Reading Process

Cited by 17 publications

References 0 publications

The border between intimacy and anonymity in innocuous action: The greeting as a social form

The border between intimacy and anonymity in innocuous action: The greeting as a social form

Introduction to the Study of Doxa

The ‘standardization of catastrophe’: Nuclear disarmament, the Humanitarian Initiative and the politics of the unthinkable

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