Justin Tonra
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jtonra.bsky.social
Justin Tonra
@jtonra.bsky.social
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Academic Integrity Officer, University of Galway.
Associate Professor of English.
Research on intersections of literature and technology.
Author, WRITE MY NAME http://doi.org/d736
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jtonra.bsky.social
Academic misconduct in John Kelly's _Cool About the Ankles_.
Examinations were regular and torturous. If you did well in your exams you were a stew, and so I was therefore technically a stew — but I never, ever stewed. I hated stewing. I preferred listening to Dave Fanning on the radio, cramming and letting my granny do the novenas. There were other techniques, too, and the most frowned upon was coggin’. This involved copying from the person next to you, passing notes, smuggling in reams of information on tissue paper, arriving with essays already written out, hiding your textbooks in the cisterns, or decorating your own body with formulae and symbols like some tattooed South Pacific warrior to be read at leisure. Very few people attempted coggin’ and even fewer with any success. I think we were all secretly against it. Anyone caught coggin’ would be court-martialled and shot. I remember one occasion when there was a bomb scare. This, after all, was the place called Northern Ireland and bomb scares had to be taken seriously. Pens down, everybody out, walk, don’t run. We would assemble on the all-weather pitch and it was inevitable that someone might eventually enquire furtively what you’d got for question six? — Why? What did you get for it? But that wasn’t the same as coggin’.
April 22, 2025 at 11:50 AM
jtonra.bsky.social
Academic misconduct in Tove Ditlevsen's _Childhood_.
Once he was going to help me write a composition about Florence Nightingale, but all that he could say about her was that she had big feet and bad breath – so I consulted Miss Mollerup instead. Otherwise my father has written a lot of my papers and gotten good grades from Miss Mathiassen. It didn’t misfire until he wrote an essay on America and ended it like this: ‘America has been called the land of freedom. Earlier it meant freedom to be yourself, to work, and to own land. Now it practically means freedom to starve to death if you don’t have money to buy food.’ ‘What in the world,’ said my classroom teacher, ‘do you mean by that nonsense?’ I couldn’t explain it, and we only got a ‘B’ for the effort.
April 22, 2025 at 11:44 AM
jtonra.bsky.social
Reading John Guillory's _On Close Reading_, this note brought to mind the mountains of unread academic publications, certain to be multiplied now by AI slop, that are generated in response to the metric fixation of the sector.

Happy World Book Day!
A passage from John Guillory's On Close Reading, discussing the rapid accumulation of literary writing, particularly through internet self-publication. It highlights that most of this writing is read by very few people or not at all, suggesting a new function for literary writing that may expire at the moment of its creation. The passage references Mark McGurl's book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.
March 6, 2025 at 9:49 AM
jtonra.bsky.social
To provide some balance to the amazing and shiny technologies, fixtures, and fittings planned for the new @uniofgalwaylib.bsky.social, I think I have convinced the librarian to use newspaper sticks.
A rack holding six newspapers on newspaper sticks.
January 29, 2025 at 4:40 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
At King’s College London this morning, talking about student perspectives on GenAI in assessment.
Conference title slide for Student Perspectives on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Assessment.
January 15, 2025 at 10:11 AM
jtonra.bsky.social
Academic misconduct in Werner Herzog’s _Every Man for Himself and God Against All_.
By the time I was twenty-one, I had made two shorts and was dead set on making a full-length feature. But at that time, it was unthinkable for a young man to be entrusted with such a project. There was no one under thirty-five in the profession any-where. Several things came together at the same time. I was continuing to earn money for my productions and did occasional stints at the university. That was mostly fraudulent, but it got me a little extra money through a scholarship even though I wasn't learning anything. I had no time. I remember asking a fellow student to write a term paper for me, which he did quite effortlessly. In jest, he asked me what I would do for him in return, and joking back, I promised I would make him immortal. His name is Hauke Stroszek. At a public event in 2017, forty-five years after my time in Munich, when I
January 14, 2025 at 9:59 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
Weird flex.
There will also be a new “supercomputer”, which the government boasts will have sufficient AI power to play itself at chess half a million times a second.
January 13, 2025 at 4:16 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
Lots of fun in class today discussing poems that play with the form and function of the sonnet in different ways.
An image of Ron Padgett's sonnet, "Nothing in that Drawer." An image of the Pentametron sonnet, "A tangled slinky is a broken heart." An image of Brad Leithauser's sonnet, "Post-Coitum Tristesse: A Sonnet." An image of Pop Sonnet's sonnet, "LXI: My reputation's sown with rumors' threads."
November 21, 2024 at 1:52 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
Students in my sonnet seminar chose one of ten poems to write about in their midterm assignment. Here's where they directed their choices.
An image of a table indicating sonnet options chosen by students to write about for a midterm assignment.
November 14, 2024 at 2:35 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
Ecclesiastical ardour and necrophilia in this morning's sonnet seminar.
An image of Thomas Hardy's sonnet, "A Church Romance" (Mellstock: circa 1835). An image of Rosanna Warren's sonnet, "Necrophiliac."
November 14, 2024 at 2:17 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
We discussed these two sonnets in today's seminar--though we could have spent the full two hours talking about either--alongside some other Leda sonnets by Rilke and Joan Murray.
An image of W. B. Yeats's sonnet, "Leda and the Swan." An image of William Meredith's sonnet, "The Illiterate."
November 7, 2024 at 1:19 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
We focused on figurative devices in today's sonnet seminar and discussed the many different metaphors for prayer in George Herbert's "Prayer (I)."
An image of George Herbert's sonnet "Prayer (I)."
October 31, 2024 at 1:36 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
In today's first class, we assembled sonnet jigsaws featuring these two poems.
An image of Samuel Daniel's sonnet, _Delia_ 38. An image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ 28. A sonnet jigsaw, featuring Samuel Daniel's _Delia_ 38.
October 24, 2024 at 12:48 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
Sonnet bangers from week 2.
An image of Robert Frost's sonnet, "Acquainted with the Night." An image of Edmund Spenser's sonnet, _Amoretti_ 78. An image of Charlotte Smith's sonnet, "Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore." An image of Paul Muldoon's sonnet, "Starlings, Broad Street, Trenton, 2003."
October 24, 2024 at 12:45 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
Stunned to learn, in today's sonnet class, that none of my students has attended a wedding that featured Sonnet 116.
An image of Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet, _Astrophil and Stella_ 45. An image of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.
October 24, 2024 at 12:42 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
An early version of Keats' "The Human Seasons" for sonnet class today and a visceral discussion of "honeyed cud."
An images of John Keats' "Four seasons fill the measure of the year."
October 24, 2024 at 12:40 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
I've posted about this class over on Twitter but it's a case of sonnet-pearls before swine; so, here are some others we read in previous weeks:

Paradoxes and metatexts in today's sonnet seminar.
Image of John Donne's sonnet, "Oh, to vew me, contraries meet in one." Image of Louise Bogan's sonnet, "Single Sonnet."
October 24, 2024 at 12:39 PM
jtonra.bsky.social
I've been teaching a seminar on the sonnet this semester and it's been hugely enjoyable: great students, engaging discussion, plenty of fun.

Today's class focused on sound devices and reading aloud, and featured two rather different sonnets by Longfellow and Alison Brackenbury.
An image of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's sonnet, "To-morrow." An image of Alison Brackenbury's sonnet, "Homework. Write a Sonnet. About Love?"
October 24, 2024 at 12:34 PM