@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12898},
      author = {Mitchell, Katherine Bellamy},
      title = {A Poetics of Apology},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {A Poetics of Apology theorizes apology as a capacious  genre by reading precisely those apologies which are often  dismissed as such—defense speeches, off-the-cuff quotidian  apologetics, and infelicitous and ironic apologies—in order  to examine the ways that this genre is used to a variety of  effects in politics, literature, and daily life, apart from  the generic expectation of producing forgiveness or  closure. I identify three characteristic aspects: a  narration of a past event, the establishing of a  relationship across a binarized apologizer and recipient,  and a transformative operation that rewrites the harm  through a desire to undo or alter it. I uncover a history  of apologies as fraught performatives which are  transformative in their expected capacity to repair  relationships in the aftermath of harm, but which are also  creatively and efficaciously employed across power dynamics  (as when a wage laborer apologizes to a customer or when a  woman apologizes to safely escape unwanted attention or to  navigate a situation of racialized tension and violence.)  In chapters on queer performance art by Vaginal Davis, José  Munoz, Adrian Piper, AA Bronson, and Adrian Stimson, public  conversations between James Baldwin and Margaret Meade,  novels by James Agee and Walker Evans, and poetry by Layli  Long Solider and Claudia Rankine, I examine how the  narrative, relational, and transformative facets of apology  are deployed in the context of race relations, class and  conversation, and scaled modes of address between  indigenous artists and colonial nation-states.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12898},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12898},
}