Imagining Money (Literature and Economics) 1-16-19

This is the first class of a new course called "Imagining Money."  You can find a draft syllabus -- an aspirational one, since we'll never get through it all -- here.  There are handouts for the first three days: the short passage from Beckett we discuss first, a miscellany of poems and riddles about money, and a selection of passages from Milton, Ovid, and Ambrose Bierce.  The syllabus gives you the lines to read from Milton's Paradise Lost, viz. Book 1, ll. 674-751, and Book 8, ll. 1-178.  And here is the Kawabata story.