“This is sooo Orwellian and Kafkaesque,” Xeeted one student.
Photo by Amit Roth
In a department-wide email last Monday, the UC San Diego Literature Department announced its upcoming Pseudo-Philosophy major, with classes reportedly bearing no difference from many existing classes in the department. The major, planned to be formally established in Winter 2026, will address widespread student concerns about the “circular, surface-level group analysis,” and “quasi-semiotic ramblings” prevalent in Literature/Writing courses.
Faculty have chosen a number of Literature/Writing courses, based on curriculum and class structure, to relabel from LTWR to LTPP next quarter. According to the department email, these will include any courses based around “reading only a handful of texts and discussing each one in a circular, rambling fashion for two to three weeks, with no relevant takeaways and minimal writing exercises or assignments.”
Literature professor Herodotus McNeill is “thrilled” that the new major will accurately characterize the courses he teaches. “I’m something of a pseudo-philosopher myself,” McNeill explained. “I think class time is best spent discussing highly intellectual ideas with very real applications to the study of literature. For example, I’m glad that I have been granted the contractarian socio-linguistic contract and can finally go from spending 80% of my class conjecturing about the Nietzsche-Aristotelian significance of a comma to 100%.”
According to McNeill, the expectation that he teach students to write has negatively affected the “pensive atmosphere” of his writing courses.
“Last year, I remember a student going so far as to stand up during our biweekly contemplation circle — I call it a contemplation circle; ‘class’ invokes compatibilistic aestheticism,” he said. “And she asked why, instead of writing poetry, we had spent over an hour discussing the extent to which the lyricization of the objectification of the initiation of the poet’s art serves as both the sign and the signified.
“Frankly, I was unsure how to respond to this,” he continued. “After all, it was technically a so-called writing class. But now, at long last, I can hold hour-and-a-half-long, purely speculative group conversations in peace.”
Students like Literature/Writing major Rida Boke hope that this change will help them better understand the types of classes they are enrolling in. Boke argues that under the current system, many students enroll in writing classes hoping to write and leave disappointed that class time is instead spent on “stupid random nonsense.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind a bit of literary analysis in my LTWR classes,” Boke said. “I am a lit major, after all. But it’s kind of crazy that until now, professors have just been allowed to not assign writing to something labeled a writing class.”
In light of the change, Geisel Library will soon begin carrying all-new pseudo-philosophy “textbooks” for LTPP classes to “aimlessly ponder.” Some notable examples will include The Commodification of the Literaturization of Writing, Syllogisms and the Pursuit of the Signified: An Exploration of Pondering in the Literary Academic Space, and The Codification of the Weaponization of Utilization of Textbooks: a Textbook.
Abby is a "journalist" who has never told a lie in her life. She enjoys long walks on the beach, beating dead horses, and running content at every possible moment.
