Sorry, Not Sorry: The Literary and Political History of Apologies, Confessions and Defense Speeches

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course examines the genre of the apology and, asks-but does not necessarily answer-the question of what a good apology is. We will read a broad historical arc of classical Greek apologia and defense speeches, works and practices of Christan confessionals, Sir Philip Sidney's Elizabethan "Apology for Poetry", as well as criticism and theory about regret and forgiveness in the "Age of Apology" after WWI. We will end by reading a number of contemporary political apologies (as well as the archive of apologies offered by celebrities and YouTube confessionals) as well as a collection of alter-apologetic literature that re-works or responds to the terms of the apologies and offers antagonistic forms of relation to the ongoing present of settler-colonialism, structural racism, and patriarchal violence. In particular, we will read works by Eve Ensler, Layli Long Soldier, Jordan Abel, and Tanya Lukin Linklater, and the queer performance collaboration between Adrian Stimson and settler artist AA Bronson, works which explore how apologetic genres open unique ways to address a national politics whose power comes about through instruments that are bureaucratic, archival, and issued on paper.