The Department of Modern Languages is delighted to announce that Luca Di Gregorio has been awarded a PhD in Italian, defending a thesis entitled ‘The Return of the Real in Postmillenial Italy: Italian Lacanianism and New Realist Trends’, completed under the supervision of Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia.
Luca’s thesis identifies a coherent and consistent Italian cultural phenomenon which he calls the ‘return of the Real’. This, Luca claims, is characterised primarily by a resurgence of interest by scholars and clinicians in Lacan’s teachings (Italian Lacanianism), especially his notion of the ‘Real’, and a return of realist trends in the arts and the media.
The notion of the ‘Real’, as received by contemporary Italian Lacanians, enables Luca to understand early 21st-century Italian realist trends not only in aesthetic terms, but also as an ethical undertaking. Luca contends that, according to contemporary Italian Lacanianism, the issue at stake in post-millennial realist art is not so much the depiction of reality or its manipulation, but rather the ‘Real’ of the untamed and pervasive jouissance that no longer encounter limits.
He exemplifies his theory in three case studies: the documentary Videocracy – Basta apparire (Gandini, 2009); the film Reality (Garrone, 2012); and the TV series In Treatment (Costanzo, 2013–2016). In his thesis, Luca addresses the ‘return of the Real’ as a broad cultural phenomenon, through the analysis of its theoretical background (i.e. contemporary Italian Lacanianism and the Lacanian notion of the Real) and its emergence in the new realist trends of postmillennial Italy.
Our congratulations to Dr Di Gregorio.
Further information on the PhD in Italian is available at https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/modern-languages/postgraduate/research-italian.html