This paper takes three critical positions. First, as a posthuman extension of the cognitive literary and cultural studies, it interrogates the anthropocentric implications in the embodiment of automaton, robot and artificial intelligence. Secondly, as an ethical intervention in technological achievements, it calls into question the pretext of progress and priority. Thirdly, as a minority criticism, it challenges the ruse of white-male domination in the realm of magic and science. In order to make visible the hidden mechanism behind the A.I. and android embodiments, I attempt to connect Jentsch’s and Freud’s old notion of the uncanny with the new concept of the creepy in the New Media. Given these theoretical intersections, I examine the curious conditions of the machine becoming able to see, which range from Moth and Bedbug, Elmer and Elsie, Shaky and Herbert to the fictional HAL 9000 and T-800. Making a case for the machine becoming (un)able to think, I look into both the inside and outside of Kempelen’s Chess-Player, Deep Blue and AlphaGo. Finally, discussing whether or not some androids have crossed the Uncanny Valley and why they can’t cross it, I argue for the highly complex embodiment of androids who dream of a relief in the morning.

Beginning with Ursula Le Guin’s “The Author of Acacia Seeds: Excerpts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,” which teaches readers to imagine animal poets, this essay extends the story’s teaching to explore its ground-breaking implication on how we perceive animal arts. That is, the humanistic tradition that equates high intelligence with language tends to belittle such non-linguistic animal arts as animal paintings, and Le Guin’s story dismantles this tendency by presenting literature by animals. In this way, the story conveys a lesson that by imaging animal poets, we can redefine the human and subsequently the human-animal relationship radically. Radical it may be by imagining animals with a highly intelligent language, however, the lesson ironically continues the fantasy of language that allows no place for animals in reality. Drawing upon Temple Grandin’s suggestion that animals, like autistic people like herself, think in pictures, the essay builds up another lesson, according to which we should keep trying to find non-linguistic ways to feel, think and live together with animals. Only by learning from these realistic and imaginative lessons, which are either wordless or yet to find words, will we be able to know what to do with ourselves and animals in the present and the future.

Complaining that sex and finance are two seemingly incongruous threads that generate the narrative fabric of Dreiser’s The Titan, critics have drawn a disproportionate amount of attention to Frank Cowperwood’s public feats, relegating the sex plot to an irrelevant distraction. Reading how sexual desire emulates the dynamics of finance capital in The Titan, this essay claims that financialization is at the core of Cowperwood’s promiscuous sex life. In the first section, I argue that finance seeks to disengage from the production of material goods by drawing from what is now called critical finance studies. Refusing to be anchored in any one particular corporate entity, finance prowls and extracts profits through ghostlike predation. In the second section, I contend that Cowperwood’s sexual desire approximates such deterritorializing movement of finance capital. I examine the ways in which Cowperwood refuses to bind himself to monogamy and any one individual female subject. Cowperwood roams and derives pleasure from as many affairs and flirtations as he can manage. In this financialized economy of sexual desire, female subjects transmute into mere effects of fluid sexual desire, just as things become the hollow shells that circulating finance leaves behind.