Rogelio Miñana – författare

The monster is a key figure in Spanish early-modern art and literature. It embodies a revolutionary fictional discourse that reflects violence and ugliness, but also freedom and spectacle. Employing both close readings and monster theory, Rogelio Minana focuses on three of Miguel de Cervantes' most representative works: the short novel ""El coloquio de los perros,"" the play ""El rufian dichoso"", and the novel ""Don Quijote de la Mancha"". Minana argues that Cervantes' protagonists - as well as the very discourse that forges them - are monstrous: extreme, beyond the norm, threatening and threatened, spectacular, and fluid in identity, form, and behavior. Cervantes' pervasive discourse of monstrosity destabilizes fixed meanings and identities as it interrogates biological, social, legal, religious, and aesthetic orders. As extraordinary beings that test the limits of identity and narrative, Minana argues, Cervantine talking monsters reveal the interpretive and discursive nature of the modern subject.

The 400th anniversaries of Don Quixote in 2005 and 2015 sparked worldwide celebrations that brought to the fore its ongoing cultural and ideological relevance. Living Quixote examines contemporary appropriations of Miguel de Cervantes's masterpiece in political and social justice movements in the Americas, particularly in Brazil.In this book, Cervantes scholar Rogelio Miñana examines long-term, Quixote-inspired activist efforts at the ground level. Through what the author terms performative activism, Quixote-inspired theater companies and nongovernmental organizations deploy a model for rewriting and enacting new social roles for underprivileged youth. Unique in its transatlantic, cross-historical, and community-based approach, Living Quixote offers both a new reading of Don Quixote and an applied model for cultural activism—a model based, in ways reminiscent of Paulo Freire, on the transformative potential of performance, literature, and art.