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“The Office Is One Thing, and Private Life Is Another”: Social Networking with the Victorians

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Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In Great Expectations, the lawyer’s clerk Wemmick tells Pip, “the office is one thing, and private life is another.” That distinction between the professional and the personal remains as crucial to twenty-first-century students as it was to the Victorians. To explore the difference, each student creates two profiles, on Facebook and on LinkedIn, for a character from an assigned novel. Basing their profiles on evidence from the text builds their literary analysis skills, while learning the expectations of LinkedIn will get students ready to prepare their own digital resumes. The assignment thus both teaches students about Victorian culture and prepares them for their post-college lives.

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Fleming, P.C. (2017). “The Office Is One Thing, and Private Life Is Another”: Social Networking with the Victorians. In: Cadwallader, J., Mazzeno, L. (eds) Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58886-5_14

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