Abstract

My paper wants to analyze the relationship between metaphor and grief since the development of the so-called Digital Death. The term Digital Death is used to identify a group of interdisciplinary studies explaining the different ways in which our present-day digital technologies are changing the human relationship with death, grieving, memory and immortality. The technological metamorphoses of our relationship with death imply many important social, philosophical and linguistic changes in the field of funeral rites and grief: virtual cemeteries, collective cultural autobiographies and encyclopedias of the dead 2.0, digital ghosts of the dead, unprecedented forms of digital immortality, etc. My paper wants to underline the ways in which these concepts intercept the process of social and cultural removal of death and the ways in which the linguistic expressions used by people change. Specifically, my paper will analyze the relationship between Digital Death and Covid-19 to underline the new progress in our uses of metaphors in the field of Death Studies.