Death is a biological event which forms an essential part of culture. All human societies have attributed some meaning to death in myth, religion, philosophy or science. The various forms of art have also represented death as an essential part of the human condition. This article discusses the cultural, social and medical constructions of death, starting with the origin myth and the contradiction between death and eternal life. It explores funeral rites and parish registers, examines death as an important social phenomenon in modern societies and considers the meaning of civil registries as instruments of social identity and legitimacy. Finally, it reflects on medicine’s power over death, death’s biological dimension and attempts to objectify signs of death.
Based upon a historical analysis of death and dying in different contexts and reflecting on the interfaces between religion, philosophy, and medicine, this paper elaborates on the ethical quandaries associated with the process of dying from three different narrative perspectives: first, second, and third person. A sound pragmatics of care is developed when these three narrative voices are integrated into a meaningful whole. The process becomes then a true ortothanasia: dying is in harmony with personal expectations and desires, the needs of relevant others and the regulations implicit or explicit in society. It is contended that beliefs and practices designed to fit into one of the narratives may not necessarily serve to explain phenomena in other discourses. A right ortothanasia demands an hermeneutics of death and a dialectics of dying.
The loss of a loved one may be considered as one of the major life-event stressors not only by its near inevitability but also by the high likelihood that we will go through it more than once in the course of a normal life span. Most people experience the loss as a natural response to a loved one’s death. Nevertheless, for a significant minority this process can be complicated. In the wake of loss, grief, mourning and bereavement appear to be synonymous terms although they differ in their clinical manifestations. Tackling the nuances linked to these concepts and the main issues involved in an adaptive or non-adaptive course of adjustment to the loss will be the aim of this chapter.
This paper aims to identify the main discursive types used when talking about organ transplants and to observe the presence of the concept of death in these types. We will summarize the main lines of research on this issue and proceed to analyze a sample of journal documents on transplants published in the newspaper El País in two different stages (1976–1986 and 2006–2016) and in which ‘death’ appears in the headline or in the subtitle. The analysis is aimed at locating main themes, basic arguments and lexical structures used to refer to death in this information framework.
In recent years, adolescents and young adults (ayas) with cancer and survivors of childhood cancer have started to organize as a collective in Europe. In this context, associations have included in their websites stories by young people diagnosed with cancer or who have gone through the disease. In this study, four of these websites (two in Spanish and two in English) are analyzed to obtain information on how ayas approach the subject of death in their stories. From the total of 128 studied stories, explicit references to death appear in 30. Discourse analysis will show us how ayas give meaning to the end of their own and their friends’ life.
This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of communicative practices surrounding the death of a five-year-old pediatric cancer patient in a hospital in Catalonia (Spain). In the present case study, I highlight the significant co-occurring variation in how cancer and death are discussed or avoided within the same sociocultural. Specifically, I focus on three ways of talking about cancer and death: (1) using religious imagery, (2) co-creating the optimistic and hopeful collusion that everything is going well, and (3) using “let’s keep fighting” language.
Death is a taboo in Western civilization. Even healthcare fields, which are strongly familiar with the end of life, cannot avoid the tendency to soften the impact caused by talking or writing about death. Like anyone else, healthcare professionals who publish clinical case reports (ccr) tend to use euphemisms. They also have the option to use a technical lexicon that could be perceived as a range of euphemistic expressions. In this chapter we review the place of death in this professional genre. We also compare several aspects of the rhetoric of death in ccr and clinical tales. The latter, though frequently written by medical authors, are intended for a non-specialized public and have a literary communicative purpose.
Moral Letters to Lucilius is a highly modern work in terms of both its generic complexity and its approach, which resembles a self-help treatise written in the twenty-first century. Seneca bases his letters on stoic approaches that may be very useful to today’s society, which lives facing outwards, frightened and stressed. The objective is to attain a moral freedom and an inner independence that removes the fear of death, among other benefits.
This study builds on previous work in the way that death and dying are represented in writing in the Humanities by looking principally though not exclusively at the work of Montaigne. It is argued that while literary texts of course portray end of life issues, it is often either focussed on the death of an individual and the surrounding grief, or “death” is used for symbolic purposes, for example as evidence of a society in decay. The essay form, which was to a large extent created by Montaigne, offers the opportunity to explore end of life questions as concepts, and to consider through them how to die – and by extension, how to live.
This chapter explores the relationship between post-Freudian melancholia, memory and mothers in the short story “Nit i boira” [“Night and Fog”] (1947) by Mercè Rodoreda. I relate the story to the concept of “desnéixer” from Maria-Mercè Marçal’s Raó del cos [The Body’s Reason] (2000). Both texts articulate the (im)possible task of freeing the maternal from controversial approaches to it such as that of classical psychoanalysis which determines the patriarchal rupture of the alleged plenitude of pre-Oedipal mother-child bond, or from the effects of a Western culture that, as Luce Irigaray claims, “repose sur le meurtre de la mère.” Alison Landsberg’s and Michael Rothberg’s views on memory help to read Rodoreda’s story, in which affection and loss are inevitably intertwined with history and politics.
From the perspective of new studies on spatiality, which favours the concept of place (as opposed to the broader concept of space), representations of death are linked to specific places that are typical of each culture. In our current culture, places such as the sanatorium, the hospital, the dying house, the coffin and the cemetery are often related to the concept of heterotopia designed years ago by Michel Foucault. Some types of heterotopia that are related to death have a high performance in the semiotics of contemporary poetry. In his work, the Catalan poet Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924–1993) depicts scenes of death that integrate many of these places, objects, characters and sequences of actions. This scenography, which is strongly shaped by metaphorical and metonymic mappings, is an essential ingredient of his poetic semiosis as part of the treatment of the subject matter of death and dying.
In this paper I will discuss two ways of extending the human life-span that have been used in Science Fiction. The first involves uploading the human mind onto a computer after physical death. The second involves a sinister scenario in which clones, doubles or virtual simulacra or simulations are created to emulate living or dead human beings. My aim is to explore these two options and examine their epistemological and ontological implications: being human without a body; the nature of an uploaded mind beyond the body’s physical death; and the role of experience, memory and emotion in the construction of human identity.
Death is a biological event which forms an essential part of culture. All human societies have attributed some meaning to death in myth, religion, philosophy or science. The various forms of art have also represented death as an essential part of the human condition. This article discusses the cultural, social and medical constructions of death, starting with the origin myth and the contradiction between death and eternal life. It explores funeral rites and parish registers, examines death as an important social phenomenon in modern societies and considers the meaning of civil registries as instruments of social identity and legitimacy. Finally, it reflects on medicine’s power over death, death’s biological dimension and attempts to objectify signs of death.
Based upon a historical analysis of death and dying in different contexts and reflecting on the interfaces between religion, philosophy, and medicine, this paper elaborates on the ethical quandaries associated with the process of dying from three different narrative perspectives: first, second, and third person. A sound pragmatics of care is developed when these three narrative voices are integrated into a meaningful whole. The process becomes then a true ortothanasia: dying is in harmony with personal expectations and desires, the needs of relevant others and the regulations implicit or explicit in society. It is contended that beliefs and practices designed to fit into one of the narratives may not necessarily serve to explain phenomena in other discourses. A right ortothanasia demands an hermeneutics of death and a dialectics of dying.
The loss of a loved one may be considered as one of the major life-event stressors not only by its near inevitability but also by the high likelihood that we will go through it more than once in the course of a normal life span. Most people experience the loss as a natural response to a loved one’s death. Nevertheless, for a significant minority this process can be complicated. In the wake of loss, grief, mourning and bereavement appear to be synonymous terms although they differ in their clinical manifestations. Tackling the nuances linked to these concepts and the main issues involved in an adaptive or non-adaptive course of adjustment to the loss will be the aim of this chapter.
This paper aims to identify the main discursive types used when talking about organ transplants and to observe the presence of the concept of death in these types. We will summarize the main lines of research on this issue and proceed to analyze a sample of journal documents on transplants published in the newspaper El País in two different stages (1976–1986 and 2006–2016) and in which ‘death’ appears in the headline or in the subtitle. The analysis is aimed at locating main themes, basic arguments and lexical structures used to refer to death in this information framework.
In recent years, adolescents and young adults (ayas) with cancer and survivors of childhood cancer have started to organize as a collective in Europe. In this context, associations have included in their websites stories by young people diagnosed with cancer or who have gone through the disease. In this study, four of these websites (two in Spanish and two in English) are analyzed to obtain information on how ayas approach the subject of death in their stories. From the total of 128 studied stories, explicit references to death appear in 30. Discourse analysis will show us how ayas give meaning to the end of their own and their friends’ life.
This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of communicative practices surrounding the death of a five-year-old pediatric cancer patient in a hospital in Catalonia (Spain). In the present case study, I highlight the significant co-occurring variation in how cancer and death are discussed or avoided within the same sociocultural. Specifically, I focus on three ways of talking about cancer and death: (1) using religious imagery, (2) co-creating the optimistic and hopeful collusion that everything is going well, and (3) using “let’s keep fighting” language.
Death is a taboo in Western civilization. Even healthcare fields, which are strongly familiar with the end of life, cannot avoid the tendency to soften the impact caused by talking or writing about death. Like anyone else, healthcare professionals who publish clinical case reports (ccr) tend to use euphemisms. They also have the option to use a technical lexicon that could be perceived as a range of euphemistic expressions. In this chapter we review the place of death in this professional genre. We also compare several aspects of the rhetoric of death in ccr and clinical tales. The latter, though frequently written by medical authors, are intended for a non-specialized public and have a literary communicative purpose.
Moral Letters to Lucilius is a highly modern work in terms of both its generic complexity and its approach, which resembles a self-help treatise written in the twenty-first century. Seneca bases his letters on stoic approaches that may be very useful to today’s society, which lives facing outwards, frightened and stressed. The objective is to attain a moral freedom and an inner independence that removes the fear of death, among other benefits.
This study builds on previous work in the way that death and dying are represented in writing in the Humanities by looking principally though not exclusively at the work of Montaigne. It is argued that while literary texts of course portray end of life issues, it is often either focussed on the death of an individual and the surrounding grief, or “death” is used for symbolic purposes, for example as evidence of a society in decay. The essay form, which was to a large extent created by Montaigne, offers the opportunity to explore end of life questions as concepts, and to consider through them how to die – and by extension, how to live.
This chapter explores the relationship between post-Freudian melancholia, memory and mothers in the short story “Nit i boira” [“Night and Fog”] (1947) by Mercè Rodoreda. I relate the story to the concept of “desnéixer” from Maria-Mercè Marçal’s Raó del cos [The Body’s Reason] (2000). Both texts articulate the (im)possible task of freeing the maternal from controversial approaches to it such as that of classical psychoanalysis which determines the patriarchal rupture of the alleged plenitude of pre-Oedipal mother-child bond, or from the effects of a Western culture that, as Luce Irigaray claims, “repose sur le meurtre de la mère.” Alison Landsberg’s and Michael Rothberg’s views on memory help to read Rodoreda’s story, in which affection and loss are inevitably intertwined with history and politics.
From the perspective of new studies on spatiality, which favours the concept of place (as opposed to the broader concept of space), representations of death are linked to specific places that are typical of each culture. In our current culture, places such as the sanatorium, the hospital, the dying house, the coffin and the cemetery are often related to the concept of heterotopia designed years ago by Michel Foucault. Some types of heterotopia that are related to death have a high performance in the semiotics of contemporary poetry. In his work, the Catalan poet Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924–1993) depicts scenes of death that integrate many of these places, objects, characters and sequences of actions. This scenography, which is strongly shaped by metaphorical and metonymic mappings, is an essential ingredient of his poetic semiosis as part of the treatment of the subject matter of death and dying.
In this paper I will discuss two ways of extending the human life-span that have been used in Science Fiction. The first involves uploading the human mind onto a computer after physical death. The second involves a sinister scenario in which clones, doubles or virtual simulacra or simulations are created to emulate living or dead human beings. My aim is to explore these two options and examine their epistemological and ontological implications: being human without a body; the nature of an uploaded mind beyond the body’s physical death; and the role of experience, memory and emotion in the construction of human identity.