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Guilty In Mark Twain's The Boatswain

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and admonish them for hampering the ship crew‟s efforts: “Yet again? What do you here? Shall we give o‟er and drown? Have you a mind to sink?” which enrages Antonio and Sebastian. Sebastian curses the Boatswain: “A‟pox o‟ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!”. This again contains corporeal, gory imagery, and again reference is made to the tortured body (A‟pox o‟ your throat), and indicates this is punishment for the Boatswain is “blasphemous” and “incharitable”. These imply that they believe he is guilty because he has put the sovereign‟s power which Foucault regards as the main offence during the time before the modern era. The punishment is a reinstatement of the sovereign‟s power, and is contrasted with the modern offences …show more content…

“The washing of ten tides” here refers to “An exaggerated form of the sentence passed upon pirates by the English court of Admiralty, which was that they should be hanged on the shore at low water mark and remain there until three tides had flowed and ebbed ” (Vaughan & Vaughan 1999). The fact that Antonio refers to this with such vehemence, tells us about the spectacular and gory nature of punishment in pre-modern era which Foucault refers to. Said 7 Discourse and Strategies of Exclusion. Foucault asserts that he has referred to discourse as „the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements” (Foucault 1972). Furthermore, Foucault dismisses the idea that current discourses have a merit of coherence. He explains that we think of them as existing because of a sophisticated set of practices that ensure their circulation and other practices that try to exclude other discourses to keep them out of circulation (Foucault 1981). Foucault identifies in the above mentioned work, “The order of discourse”, three external procedures of exclusion, namely, taboo, the distinction between mad and sane, and the distinction between true and

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