Craving Credibility: Teresa de Avila’s Shifting Discourse in Meditaciones sobre los Cantares

This article explores Teresa de Avila's text from the point of view of its enunciation, proposing Benveniste's theory of personal pronouns as a means to analyse Teresa's use of pronouns as revealing shifters that indicate a fluctuating definition of "we" and a changing perspective of the "I" or "we" in relation to the other(s). This study serves as a means to illuminate the multiple addressees inscribed in Teresa's text, as well as the use of "non-persons"--the third-person Bride of the Song of Songs, the Virgin Mary, and the Samaritan woman--both to mask and to support the underlying first-person nature of the narrative.