Genre, Vol. 45, No. 1 Spring 2012 DOI 10.1215/00166928-1507047 © 2012 by University of Oklahoma Mixed Feelings: Ashbery, Duchamp, Roussel, and the Animation of Cliché SUSAN ROSENBAUM, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping . . . – William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity I. On the Cliché: “Not Dead But Sleeping” Christopher Ricks points out in an essay on clichés that “the only way to speak of a cliché is with a cliché” (1984, 356). For a particular constellation of artists — Raymond Roussel, Marcel Duchamp, and John Ashbery — this statement could be taken as a guiding principle, the cliché providing the literal materials of their art and enabling self-reflexive meditation on art in the age of its mechanical reproduction. In their experiments with the cliché we can excavate an ambivalent romance with the banal things of everyday life that continues to reverberate. Cliché, the past participle of the French clicher , a variant of cliquer (to click), is a printing term that emerged in the early nineteenth century: it refers to the stereotype block used in printing, and originated in the clicking sound produced when melted lead was struck to make stereotypes. By the second half of the nine- teenth century the definition of cliché was extended to photographic negatives, reflecting the close ties between photography and print as means of mechani- cal reproduction (they were conjoined in the late nineteenth century in photo- mechanical reproduction). 1 As applied to literature, cliché is used figuratively, Portions of this essay were presented at the 2004 MLA and 2007 MSA conferences and in 2008 at the University of Florida: thanks to all who provided feedback. 1. See OED, Dictionnaire de l’academie francaise, 6th ed., 1832 – 35; The American Amateur Photographer 1891.