Pudding Seminars

Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Antonia White’s Frost in May are semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman novels which both follow the development of young writers as they grow up in conservative religious spaces. This seminar will explore how literature and religion interact in the lives of the protagonists, with literature informing personal faith and religion an influence on the authors’ works. It will further assess interaction with religious and parental authority figures, and the reparative power of writing after betrayal by parents and religious communities.

Biography: I am a third year Theology student interested in the relationship between theology and literature. I am currently writing my dissertation on the importance of religion and literature for the emergence of Jeanette Winterson and Antonia White as authors from religious communities as retold in their semi-autobiographical novels Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Frost in May. Outside of my degree, I am co-president of Newnham College Poetry Society and Newnham College Book Club.

In June 1838, a group of five temple dancers and three accompanists, including the nattuvanar, were brought to Europe by E.C. Tardivel. The troupe was attached to the Perumal Temple in Thiruvanthipuram in modern-day Tamil Nadu. The archival trace left behind by these ‘bayaderes’ as the Indian temple dancers were referred to in Europe, is vast, and there is a profusion of images the performances left behind. Can these images tell us more about the modern renditions of the form, which came up within the backdrop of the Indian movement for independence?

Ranjini is a third-year PhD student at the Faculty of Education looking at how dance in India replicates socio-religious hierarchies.

This presentation will share an aspect of my PhD fieldwork that explored how young children (aged 4 – 5) used play to engage with stories after shared readings. My fieldwork involved conducting video recordings of young children in reception classes reading picture books, with an adult, and engaging in related play activities. Analysis of the resulting video corpus indicated that young children used play to edit moments of tension within stories, bringing a writerly element to their post-shared reading meaning-making. The children’s edits involved repetitions that intensified, avoided and comedically changed moments of tension. These findings suggest that young children’s responses to shared readings involve playful edits, blurring the edges between readerly and writerly aspects of meaning-making.