On October 1, 2024, Mélanie Heydari, lecturer in French and Comparative Literature, published her new book, Vikram Seth’s Poetics of Pastiche.
In the book, Heydari conducts a comprehensive review of the work of Vikram Seth, who she argues is a critical enigma: Although Seth is regarded as one of the most important Indian Anglophone authors of his time, his body of work as a whole remains surprisingly understudied. Heydari postulates that the reason for this oversight may be Seth’s disregard for the norms of intellectual fashion; Seth, she asserts, is a writer who defied the expectations of both postcolonial and world literature, remaining unfazed by the intersection of diverse cultures in the increasingly globalized world around him - a response not shared by his contemporaries. With Vikram Seth’s Poetics of Pastiche, which marks the first study of its kind on Seth, Heydari delves deeply into the implications of the writer’s work and its relative critical neglect, while developing a reimagined critical methodology through which to consider his literature.