Papers with a specifically comparative focus on the sins of reading (Peccata Lectionis) can examine the topic of the seminar from a theoretical, methodological and thematic perspective. If we speak about the event of reading in a general sense, misreading as an interpretative act should not necessarily be defined as a sin or even as a mistake. At least, this cannot be done as clearly as in a legal, ethical or psychological discourse about sin or a mistake in the case of a Mozart overture played out of tune. What then is the sin of reading?

From a theoretical point of view, it may well be defined as a complement to "the virtue of reading" (Virtus Lectionis, Ambrus 2026). All this creates a connection between the literary canon and canonisation known from the Christian religious tradition, and perhaps the sin of reading lies in non-canonical interpretation. Also, literary critics as professional readers can commit one of the sins of reading when losing their credibility with lay people watching them. However, the most radical theoretical and methodological problem stems from language itself. If we give credit to Nietzsche’s philosophical claims on language adopted from Gustav Gerber, we must also consider language itself and hence literature as an accumulation of errors, in accordance with Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor, identifying the origin of tropes as linguistic errors. The professional reading of literature, which is considered as a set of mistakes, is already lying when it discusses its subject not as rhetorical errors, but as aesthetic quality. When we study the literary works of different cultures and periods and think about the sins related to reading, we can come to a similar conclusion.

The seminar welcomes any comparative and even interdisciplinary paper that wants to take into account the above problems of reading, primarily in association with the Judeo-Christian tradition and sin understood according to Western philosophical concepts. From a literary point of view, special attention may be paid to the works of Aristophanes, Dante, Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges or Paul Auster, and from a religious point of view, to the works of Philo of Alexandria, the Kabbalist thinkers, Origen, Saint Augustine, Hugh of Saint Victor, Ticonius, Rudolf Bultmann, Northrop Frye, Gershom Scholem, and David Tracy.