The (Un)Welcome Stranger: Intercultural Sensitivity in Six American Novels

My research explores the level of inclusivity in fictional communities in six classic American novels: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s’ The Scarlet Letter, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, Henry James’ The American, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. It also measures the intercultural sensitivity in fictional characters in these communities, focusing on characters who are deemed different in these communities as well as those who represent the status quo in those communities. The cultural interactions, the conflicts that occur in these novels, serve as models when viewed under the lens of Milton J. Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, providing a truly interdisciplinary perspective on human differences, fusing a formal literary analysis with an intercultural sensitivity theory typically applied to study abroad work. The multiple perspectives of the research plays well with the analysis of different voices in the fiction, voices of different race, gender, culture, or class, creating a work of research that truly combines the literary humanities and social sciences. My broad scope is a new direction in the study of identity and difference in literary characters, one that has practical applications in the “real world” as the novels and the characters in them, the conflicts they experience, provide modeling for accepting difference, adapting to it, and maybe even integrating with it rather than minimizing, denigrating, or denying difference.