Mélanie Heydari

Mélanie Heydari received her PhD in postcolonial literature from the Sorbonne, Paris, in 2012. She has lectured on her research at international conferences and has published multiple papers in peer-reviewed journals. Her areas of research include mimetic practices, (auto)biography and the intricacies of personal and historical memory, and women’s and feminist literature. Mélanie acquired extensive experience in the classroom during her time in the English department of the Sorbonne and has since taught in leading institutions of higher education, on both sides of the Atlantic. She currently teaches French language and literature at Barnard College and world literature at Gallatin, NYU.

Heydari's new book,Vikram Seth’s Poetics of Pastiche, was released in 2024 and available through Palgrave Macmillan.

"Vikram Seth is a critical enigma. He is recognized as one of the most important Indian Anglophone authors of his generation; his individual works have been widely reviewed, yet his work has rarely been approached as a whole and remains surprisingly understudied. Perhaps the chief reason for the paucity of critical response to the full compass of Seth’s work is his disregard for intellectual fashion. Indeed, Seth is at once very popular and deliberately unfashionable. His literary affiliations are conservative; seemingly uninterested in any revisionary narrative, he is equally unconcerned by the interpenetration of cultures in our globalized world, representing assimilation rather than cultural difference. He defies the expectations of both postcolonial and world literature; therefore, to discuss his critical neglect is to shed light on the limitations of these labels. As the most thorough attempt to map a general poetics in Seth’s work, this study – the first of its kind on this writer– develops a new critical methodology to capture the nuances of Seth’s literary strategies. It provides scholars and students insight into the key features of Seth’s work and uncovers a consistent authorial strategy running through his seemingly disconnected body of work, namely a systematic use of intertextual practices."