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Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will look at texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge not only to humanity but to the humanities: the disciplines and modes of thought that we rely on to make sense of the human condition. The second part of the course will examine works of literature and film for examples of how contemporary artists attempt to make the climate crisis visible and intelligible to us.