The intellectual contributions of the printing press to the rise of scientific rationality, the revival of interest in remote sources, and the emergence of secularism and civil society have been widely celebrated. Less remarked is the role these presses played in enabling the political revolutions of modernity: from the American Continental to the French Assignat and the Haitian Gourde, emancipatory struggles have used print as much to circulate ideas as to circulate counter-economies.

Print money and print literature emerged from the same matrix and the same revolutionary horizon. What should we make of the current moment, in which a new medium of value — the blockchain — has arisen alongside new digital textualities, from smart contracts and DAO charters to NFT-bound fictions and algorithmically generated verse? Does this pairing recapitulate, in a new register, the old entanglement of representation and revolution, or does distributed, authorless inscription pose genuinely new questions for literary and monetary theory?

This seminar invites papers reading money and literature together — as cognate technologies of inscription, promise, and collective fiction. We welcome work that:

• Traces historical entanglements of literary and monetary innovation, from revolutionary currencies and their print cultures to the realist novel's relation to credit and speculation (Dickens, Balzac, Melville).
• Examines Web3 technologies in the light of theories of authorship (Barthes, Foucault, Blanchot), with an eye to the legibility and legitimacy of aesthetic strategies of impersonality, pseudonymy, and performativity.
• Reads blockchain and cryptocurrency as literary objects: the whitepaper as genre, the DAO charter as constitution, NFTs and the afterlives of authorship.
• Reopens Marxist and other philosophies of economy — value-form theory, finance capital, heterodox and non-Marxist alternatives (mutual credit, gift economies, degrowth, non-Western and ancient economic epistemologies (as in the works of Agamben)) — in light of digital currencies.
• Brings philosophy of technology (Heidegger, Simondon, Stiegler, Hui) and digital anthropology to bear on money as technical, mnemotechnical, and social infrastructure.
• Analyzes the joint dependency of literature and economy on technologies of inscription and transmission, including the recent decline in literacy rates, the rise of short-form video content, and other manifestations of what could be called a “subprime attention crisis” in the digital age.
• Considers modernist and postmodern aesthetics of monetary crisis and speculation, from historical bubbles to crypto volatility, and the counter-economies literature has sustained: scrip, ledgers, manifestos, forums.

Comparative and interdisciplinary work is especially welcome, including scholarship beyond the Euro-American archive.