Oh, the *joys* of research.

Today, I've spent quite a lot of my free time dedicated to writing my Abstract Bibliography for my Master's class term paper. By this, I mean I take all of the sources, write 75 words deeming what they're basically trying to say, write their citation as it will be on the bibliography, and turn it in. Sooo easy, right?

Well, now it's not. I've been having this question of whether to include two certain sources in my bib. While the paper is basically a giant Rhetorical Analysis, these papers were quoted in at least 3 of my critical sources. My term paper is on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and specifically, dualism in the two. What I'm looking at is different sources that say what that dualism is. I have one that talks about the Double Brain Theory and one that talks about the nature/civilization duality, one that brings Neitzche's antithesis/synthesis into dualism...you get where I'm going.

Well, in at least 3/8 critical sources, they make quite a big deal about this psychologist dude named Frederic Myers and these two people with multiple personalities he reported on called Felida X and Louis V. Felida X was this one chick who had a dominant personality (1st p.) that would occasionally go into this other personality (2nd p.) Myers specifically states that 2nd p was "better" than 1st p because 1st p was melancholy and sickly, and 2nd p was "gay and lively, almost noisy" which I think is hilarious. Eventually, 2nd p became the dominant of Felida's personalities, only occasionally interrupted by 1st p. Her case can be found in Myers' book "Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death." The Louis V case was a little harder to find. It was published in 1886 in a book called "The Nineteenth Century, Vol 20" Do you know how many DIFFERENT, USELESS things you get when you type that into Google?! But alas, eventually, I found it. It was on Google Books. But I think citing Google Books in your MASTERS RESEARCH TERM PAPER WORTH 65% OF YOUR GRADE is a wee bit tacky, so I had to find this rare study from another place...30 minutes later, I found it (PDF) off of some random university's website.

SO ANYWAY.

I'm having trouble deciding whether they should go in my annotated bibliography since they're not critical studies of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but many critics reference them as the starting place for the duality of the story. I could possibly use them to prove the critics crazy or legit...but that's not REALLY my job: my job is to point out the critics weaknesses and strengths of their arguments.

Ermmm, maybe I should just include them anyway and ask my teacher if I can put them in there. I really won't even know until I write the paper, anyway.

Erm, yeah, and my basil still hasn't grown. Not that I'm obsessively checking. :P