Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Blood's Will: Speculative Fiction, Existence, and Inquiry of Currere: 53 (Complicated Conversation: A Book Series of Curriculum Studies)

In Blood's Will: Speculative Fiction, Existence, and Inquiry of Currere, main character Campbell Cote Phillips-a successful university professor, mother, and wife-faces the question "what would she give up to have everything else?" Her comfortable life takes an unexpected turn when she discovers that not everything is always as it appears to be. The story unfolds between the 1970s and contemporary Baltimore, weaving together the experiences of Finn (an unusual vampire with a strange history) and Campbell-along with a cast of characters across different generations-whose stories are portrayed in base-relief against the promise, or peril, of immortality. Blood's Will is about love and desire, but it is also about family, friends, and the choices we all make. To be human is to sacrifice. To be vampire is to have endless opportunities. As Noel Gough writes, "Understanding curriculum work as a storytelling practice has been a key theme in the reconceptualisation of curriculum studies during the last three decades, encapsulated by Madeleine Grumet's formulation of curriculum as 'the collective story we tell our children about our past, our present, and our future.'" Situated as a story embedded in the four stages of currere, the journey of the book's main characters exemplifies the journey of recursion: the regressive, the progressive, the analytical, and the synthetic. Blood's Will is an example of speculative fiction that "can contribute to an aspect of effective deliberation that Schwab called 'the anticipatory generation of alternatives'" (Gough). This book is a useful reading for courses examining roles of narrative, fiction, and currere as fields of inquiry. Review " Blood's Will is a speculative fiction in the vampire subgenre that also functions as a philosophical meditation on curriculum inquiry (with particular reference to the autobiographical method now known as currere) and dramatizes ontological, epistemological, and axiological questions about human knowledges and understandings of living and dying. It is clearly informed by feminist, counter-heteronormative, and what I would call post-humanist positions. This book is a significant contribution to the literature of curriculum theorizing." --Noel Gough, Professor Emeritus at La Trobe University " Blood's Will: Speculative Fiction, Existence, and Inquiry of Currere is a significant contribution--and really, a remarkable piece of work--by one of the nation's most important scholar/authors in the curriculum studies, teacher education, educational policy, and research fields. This work isn't merely a novel that you can't put down, it is a window to so many salient themes that we think about in our work on a daily basis and have few innovative resources to address them in our work as individuals and with students. I believe this book will be read widely and should be taught in our courses." --Tom Poetter, Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University "As a professor of literacy, I understand the value of narrative and inquiry in shaping our lives and the world around us. Morna McDermott McNulty offers a groundbreaking work of feminist ficto-currere that asks its readers the deeper questions about how the stories we tell create identity and the power of the imagination to reshape our worlds. Blood's Will weaves together threads of memory, fiction, and existence to create a tapestry of transformative inquiry." --Nancy Rankie Shelton, Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County "Not since Madeleine Grumet's Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching have I fallen under the spell of a powerful and creative feminist text. Morna McDermott McNulty's Blood's Will makes this passage between the public and private worlds for our contemporary times. No doubt, you too will devour this compelling postmodern feminist novel conveying larger life themes through the vampire archetype!" --Carol Mullen, Professor of Educati