Cliché Events

Abstract This chapter examines how “cliché events” work in practice by extensively exploring four distinctive practices: endorsing, hoarding, recreating, and celebrating clichés. It investigates how individuals and communities negotiate their complex relationships with clichés, often blending irony, sincerity, critique, and appreciation. By analyzing phenomena such as self-admitted clichés and contemporary movements including New Sincerity and Uncreative Writing, the authors demonstrate how speakers and writers actively embrace, appropriate, and transform clichés, challenging traditional perspectives that associate clichés exclusively with ignorance or creative laziness. The chapter highlights literary and artistic practices that explicitly engage with clichés, beyond mere irony or parody, showcasing how collections, accumulations, and repetitions of clichés (hoarding) and creative appropriations or recontextualizations (recreating) challenge traditional notions of originality and authenticity. The authors also examine the recent cultural shift they term the Neo-cliché turn, in which clichés are openly celebrated, influenced by digital meme culture, viral content, and social media practices. Through examples across literature, art, public discourse, and digital media, this exploration marks a significant contemporary shift toward appreciating repetition, mimicry, familiarity, and collective participation in creative expression and communal practices.