From Cliche to Archetype

Topics, commonplaces and cliches each provide a way of establishing the common grounds for agreement about experience necessary to persuasion or reasoning, if it is to be perceived as valid. They each argue on the grounds of analogy, claiming that nothing is self-evident; they each concern themselves with social context, recognising that persuasion has much to do with the positions of the rhetor or speaker or writer and the addressee; and they each are historically bound, constructed by current ideologies and material circumstances. Yet as devices for valid reasoning they are usually undervalued and often distorted through careless decontextualising, removal from the social and historical that leaves their argument by analogy open to trivial interpretation.