I thought Frailty's Name was Carl”:

Abstract

William Shakespeare's Hamlet has become one of the most cited, appropriated, and referenced texts in the Western canon. This article examines an overlooked appropriation, the cult classic TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000's episode entitled “Hamlet.” Popularly known as MST3K, the show engaged in a very postmodern, metadiscourse by depicting characters watching bad movies and making sarcastic comments about them for the viewer at home. But in taking on this gloomy, black-and-white German-language production of Hamlet, this MST3K episode poses important questions about what constitutes a canonical work and how exactly a work becomes part of a literary canon. Through an analysis of this episode of MST3K through the perspectives of aesthetic and postmodern theory, this article suggests that this appropriation of Hamlet ushers in a new type of canon initiation, and, in the case of MST3K's take on the play, presents what I would like to call a “postmodern canon.”

Faith and fantasy: The interplay of Islam and pop culture in “99 Cahaya di Langit Eropa”

“…Filmmakers wrap up their ideological content in romantic and melodrama fashion. Both pop culture and postmodernism get involved in each other, much in a deconstructive reflection of old texts to entirely new versions of [ancient] texts (Mills, 2015). Strategic resistance is a claim of liberation from subjectivity to oppression.…”