Bruno Schulz's Cinnamon Shops, introduces a heretical Father, whose experiments in creation border on "regions of great heresy." His creatures populate an avian kingdom among the rafters of the family's home. These monstrous, colorful beings, derive from the Father's permutation of an ornithological "compendia," technically a profane text that he imagines contains the secrets to creation itself. His son identifies him as "our heresiarch" and he reproduces the Father's teachings as "The Second Book of Genesis." In other words, Schulz's characters propose a different and novel alternative revelation, contingent on the idea of heresy as a fundamental aspect of human experience. Likewise, Borges appends to his short story, "Aleph," a curious commentary in which he argues that the Hebrew letter, aleph, and its revelation in his narrative, is a false one because his fictional rival, Daneri, has been able to exploit, reveal, its secret, and in the process, profit from its revelation. He justifies his condemnation of his own short story by underscoring how the real revelation of the aleph is the failure of its prophets. 

Thus literature exhibits many scenes of heresy that freight its necessity and provoke its condemnation. However, several might argue, as Olga Tokarczuk, has recently suggested, that heresy might be a social good. This seminar explores how heresy can be understood in more nuanced and complicated ways in which the imagination proposes a heretical boundary as part of literary ontology in order to experience its liberation.

A seminar sponsored by the ICLA Research Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature, this seminar examines comparative literature from the perspective of its heresies and transgressions, in order to think about "heresy" as a necessary property of literature, transgression as a necessary boundary of the imagination. We invite comparative papers that explore any facet of the topic.