Toward a Rhetoric of the Stage: The Scenic Realization of Verbal Cliches

Constructing narratives of enterprise: clichés and entrepreneurial self‐identity

“…Many authors (Tsoukas, 1991; Fraser, 1993; Newmark, 1988) note the transition over time from figurative “live” metaphors, where context and creativity are still required for understanding, such as, the heart is a lonely hunter, to “dead” metaphors, such as the mouth of a river, where usage has become habitual and literal, with little, if any evocation of the initial imagery. In this view, other tropes have been suggested as “staging points” on the road to the dead metaphor such as cliché (Le Sage, 1941; Booth, 1978; Amossy, 1981) and the “cliché metaphor” (Newmark, 1988). Gibbs (1993, p. 273) argues that while dead metaphors may be classed as idioms, nonetheless there is an unconscious mental mapping during speech that evokes the initial visual domain, as linkages are made to more vivid imagery that is now seen at a distance.…”

The Epistemology of Rhetoric

“…Though her research on cliché and stereotype deals with aspects that Barthes would have described as doxa, it is not until 2002 that the term doxa is central to Amossy's scholarship. To properly situate her later treatment of doxa, however, we need to start with her research on the literary function of cliché from the early 1980s (Amossy 1982(Amossy , 1981(Amossy , 1984. Amossy (1982) criticises the romanticist condemnation of cliché as the very mark of triteness and argues that clichés are playing an important role in a great variety of textual strategies.…”

“…Barthes has a focus on 'the text' and the tight relationship between words and doxa that is kept by Amossy. However, in "Toward a Rhetoric of the Stage" (Amossy 1981) it becomes clear that she, just as Barthes does, writes in relation to a general semiol-ogy that includes non-verbal sign systems, but understands linguistics as the model structure for this general semiology (cf. Barthes 1977b, 9-12).…”