| Written by Spanish Carmelite nun, Teresa of Avila (1515--1582), the Interior Castle argues that souls exist, that God dwells within them, and that human beings may experience this reality. This dissertation studies how this classic story of a mystical journey to God may be said to foster unity with audiences through its narrator's rhetoric of communal solidarity. Although the narrator writes specifically to a readership of Carmelite nuns living in sixteenth-century Spain, she also actively seeks the readerly participation of those who live outside convent walls and even future generations of readers as well. How does the narrator see herself connecting to audiences as she portrays herself as a politically savvy interpreter of women's realities in dangerous times as well as a sage of mystical knowledge? How might she be said to link with a diverse readership of audiences who study the text in different ways and for different reasons? The work's implied multiple readers make it a fruitful site at which to explore diverse reading practices and to reconstruct early modern and postmodern audiences. This dissertation constructs a broad and dynamic explanatory and descriptive hermeneutic of textual "unity" that describes audiences as active participants in the creation of textual meaning. Arguments of textual unity have traditionally been proposed to defend a work's excellence or perfection. I argue that the unity of the narrative discourse in the Interior Castle may be reasonably defended without positing any one reading that would "fix" this story into a frozen narrative pattern as if only one interpretation is correct.;The study is new in the way its interdisciplinary agenda integrates and critiques current scholarly methods and perspectives, for example, historical critical methods, postmodern philosophies, rhetorical narratology, feminist theory, and theological models. Some postmodernists will posit a warning. Any such putative rhetorical unity is necessarily conditional, complex, and controversial, if not impossible. Yet the Interior Castle so obviously "intends" readers that it readily lends itself to discussion about how readers could see themselves represented in a text and how the narrative anticipates certain responses. In my dissertation, through the aid of a questionnaire, I venture beyond the boundaries of textual criticism that limits itself to elements within the text to explore real audiences' responses to the story, to see how or whether they, as flesh-and-blood readers, "link" with the text and whether they thus "flesh-out" theoretical locations of readers.;Self reflection about how one reads a text or positions oneself in relationship to it not only constructs "windows" of knowledge about a work in the desiring, reading soul but also promotes understanding of the "other" as reader, writer, and speaker. |
