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Notes
1. Kevin Rudd, “Apology to the Stolen Generations,” The Age (Australia), Feb. 13, 2008, http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/bfull-textb-pms-sorry-address/2008/02/12/1202760291188.html
2. Lisa Storm Villadsen, “Speaking on Behalf of Others: Rhetorical Agency and Epideictic Functions in Official Apologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 (2008): 25–45.
3. See Yosef Z. Liebersohn, Yair Neuman, and Zvi Bekerman, “Oh Baby, It's Hard for Me to Say I'm Sorry: Public Apologetic Speech and Cultural Rhetorical Resources,” Journal of Pragmatics 36 (2004): 921–44; Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
4. Apologia has been a subject of interest to rhetorical critics for several decades. B.L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel's important early article, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves,” assumed apologia to be a genre in itself and suggested both a terminology and a methodology for studying speeches given in defense of one's character. See B.L. Ware and Wil Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On the Generic Criticism of Apologia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 273–83.
5. Koesten and Rowland saw the rhetoric of atonement as a subgenre of apologia. The authors suggested that the key difference between the two kinds of utterance concerns the acknowledgement of wrongdoing and acceptance of responsibility as a sinner. Whereas apologia is concerned with denying, deferring, or minimizing guilt, an apology accepts guilt as a fact. While these authors account for the genre in religious terms, there seems to be a need to further conceptualize official apologies in secular terms. See Joy Koesten and Robert C. Rowland, “The Rhetoric of Atonement,” Communication Studies 55 (2004): 68–87; Villadsen, “Speaking on Behalf of Others.”
6. Halford Ryan blew new life into the field with the argument that apologia should be studied in conjunction with the accusation that prompted it. In addition to his call to study such “speech sets,” Ryan also clarified that the attacks responded to in apologia did not have to be exclusively on a person's character, but might also concern matters of policy. See Halford Ross Ryan, “Kategoria and Apologia: On Their Rhetorical Criticism as a Speech Set,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 254–61. One significant result of Ryan's thinking was the edited volume Oratorical Encounters, which offered a number of case studies of both ancient and contemporary instances of the genre. See Halford Ross Ryan, ed., Oratorical Encounters: Selected Studies and Sources of Twentieth-Century Political Accusations and Apologies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). William Benoit's Accounts, Excuses and Apologies was instrumental in redirecting the study of apologia toward corporate crisis communication, a subject that may fairly be said to have developed into a field of its own in the past decade with Keith Michael Hearit's Crisis Management by Apology as one of the most recent contributions. See William L. Benoit, Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies: A Theory of Image Restoration Strategies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); and Keith Michael Hearit, Crisis Management by Apology: Corporate Responses to Allegations of Wrongdoing (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006).
7. One example of a novel way of working with the traditional genre of apologia is Kendall R. Phillips, “Tactical Apologia: The American Nursing Association and Assisted Suicide,” Southern Communication Journal 64 (1999): 143–54. Another example is Herbert W. Simons, “A Dilemma-Centered Analysis of Clinton's August 17th Apologia: Implications for Rhetorical Theory and Method,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 438–53, although Simons here explicitly keeps an instrumental focus.
8. See, for example, Kyoko Kishimoto, “Apologies for Atrocities: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of World War II's End in the United States and Japan,” American Studies International 42 (2004): 17–50; Jason A. Edwards, “The Mission of Healing: Kofi Annan's Failed Apology,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 16 (2008): 88–104; and Emil B. Towner, “Truly Public Apologies: Third-Party Participation in Rwandan Apologetic Rhetoric,” Qualitative Research Reports in Communication 11 (2010): 63–69. Outside the field of rhetoric, two of the most commonly cited monographs are sociologist Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa and psychologist Aaron Lazare, On Apology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Both these volumes have provided important inspiration to rhetorical critics concerning the social functions of apologies and criteria for a good apology. Another strand of research by rhetoricians, cultural studies scholars, and sociologists, among others, pursues connections between official apologies and collective memory. This approach was highlighted at the 14th Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference in Minneapolis in 2010, where a special “supersession” was dedicated to rhetorical commentary on sociologist Jeffrey K. Olick's The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007).
9. This focus is chosen over other important theoretical angles, most notably the abundant literature on forgiveness and reconciliation. See, for example, Trudy Govier, Taking Wrongs Seriously: Acknowledgment, Reconciliation, and the Politics of Sustainable Peace (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2006); Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn, eds., Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); and Charles L. Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
10. Note, for example, Jeffrey Olick's observation in The Politics of Regret that “[s]eeing social life as an ongoing reproductive process, new political culture analysts focus not only on how, in doing so, they produce, reproduce, or change identities. The struggle for position that constitutes politics, therefore, is always simultaneously strategic and constitutive” (39).
11. Apologia is concerned with denying, deferring, or minimizing guilt; apology acknowledges it. Apologiae, in other words, serve functions of “normalizing” social relations in the sense of “closing the book.” In contrast, apologies work on the assumption that relations have been so damaged that something has to change fundamentally for relations to improve. Apologies thereby open a new chapter through examination of the wrongful behavior and renegotiating the terms of contact between groups of people. See also note 6.
12. In his discussion of the role of forgiveness in political apology, Griswold argues persuasively that political apology should not be regarded as a non-paradigmatic instance of the interpersonal apology (138). Marguerite La Caze has argued that whereas apologizing may be a duty for a government, forgiveness is discretionary and therefore should not be thought of as crucial to successful official apologies. See La Caze, “The Asymmetry Between Apology and Forgiveness,” Contemporary Political Theory 5 (2006): 447–68.
13. Nobles mentions as examples of symbolic politics “representational actions, discourse, and symbols themselves, all of which are invested with meanings” (149).
14. This is further underscored by Nobles’ discussions of the wishes and motivations of the minority groups at the receiving end of official apologies. A general theme is that apologies do not serve inclusive purposes if they unilaterally determine the grounds of the sought-after reconciliation between groups. Especially problematic is a more right-wing view that equality means equal legal rights to all. To many minority groups, an equal position in society can only come about through recognition of their different cultural heritage, which must be reflected in legislation that allows them to uphold that, and not, as conservatives would have it, a system that induces them to conform and assimilate to the majority culture.
15. A quote from Japanese Emperor Hirohito speaking on occasion of a visit from ROK President Chun Doo Hwan in 1984.
16. Bauer argues that this can explain the failure of prominent Catholics such as Ted Kennedy and Bernard Law, both of whom, when they addressed the public with confessions of wrongdoing, didn't appreciate the significance of making their trespasses a matter between them and the public rather than them and God or the authorities (200).
17. See David A. Ling, “A Pentadic Analysis of Senator Edward Kennedy's Address to the People of Massachusetts, July 25, 1969” in Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice, ed. Sonja K. Foss (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1989), 344–51.
18. The reprinted texts include Senator Edward Kennedy on the Chappaquiddick Island accident; presidential candidate Jimmy Carter's admission of sexual desire as presented in a Playboy article; pastor Jim Bakker's original confession of sexual infidelity in the PTL scandal; Pentecostal pastor and televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's sermon of confession; President Clinton's statements and confessions in the Monica Lewinsky scandal; and Cardinal Bernard Law's apologies regarding his handling of allegations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese.
19. In a catalog of varieties of apologies, Smith categorizes apologies as: categorical, ambiguous, expressions of sympathy, value-declaring, conciliatory, compensatory, purely instrumental, coerced, and apologies made by proxy (140–52).
20. In total, Smith discusses eleven elements of the categorical apology in chapter two (28–107).
21. Celeste Michelle Condit, “Crafting Virtue: The Rhetorical Construction of Public Morality,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 79–97.
22. Interestingly, Smith quotes Bill Clinton's Tuskegee speech in extenso but without commentary, leaving it up to the reader to consider the meanings the apology does and does not provide (250–51).