This book presents a panoramic analysis of public apologies of politicians, businessmen, and entertainers in American culture. With an abundance of examples including some memorable apologies from the past and the present times as data, linguist Edwin Battistella describes and dissects the hidden mechanisms of public apologies by illuminating various ways that both sincere and insincere apologies work. The analysis of the fascinating stories and anecdotes behind the apologies Battistella has chosen yields fresh insights into the process of meaning creation through language use in situated contexts.
The book comprises ten chapters. Chapters 1 through 4 are foundational in the sense that they introduce the process and the language of apology in general, which help to pave the way for further discussion of the topics of the book in later chapters. Chapter 1 opens with the scope of apologies. Erving Goffman's metaphor of the split self of the apologizer, his idea of social ritual, and the apology-account continuum are presented and exemplified with a number of apologies. Chapter 2 delves into the process of apology where the apologizers' interests and the interaction between the actors concerned are examined. Chapters 3 and 4 deal mainly with the language used in apologizing. Using J. L. Austin's (How to do things with words, 1962) concept of performatives and H. Paul Grice's (‘Logic and conversation’, 1975) idea of conversational implicature, Battistella discusses in considerable detail the expressions involving words such as apologize, sorry, regrets, and forgive as well as grammatical structures in a number of examples.
Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with confession and excuse. Seen as an important step in apology, Chapter 5 attempts to identify ways to confess, followed by four historical case studies. Chapter 6 moves on to the topic of excuse, focusing on how apology is used as verbal self-defense. The following two chapters turn to national and international apologies. The former chapter probes into apologies from nations for historical misdeeds against their own people whereas the latter concentrates on apologies from one nation to another. The last two chapters look at the motivation for apology and the apology in American popular culture. In chapter 9, Battistella explores reasons why people apologize or do not apologize. The possible complicated purposes of apologies and the reasons they succeed or fail are examined. A discussion of apology in American culture is presented in relation to such issues as gender and power in chapter 10. The chapter concludes with a summary of the scope and meaning of apologies. At the end of the book, Battistella provides a useful reader's guide to the analysis of apology. With a list of six key questions, readers are provided with an opportunity to analyze three additional freestanding samples of apology.
This book is a valuable addition to the fields of discourse studies, sociology, and communication studies. It should also be appealing to those who take an interest in history and politics.
