Teaching
Current and Recent Teaching
In Fall 2023 Roche was on leave and working on a book Theories of Ugliness: An Unseemly Aesthetic History, which is contracted with Bloomsbury Press. In Spring 2024 he is teaching a College Seminar on "Faith, Doubt, Reason" and a seminar entitled "The Cinematic World of Alfred Hitchcock."
In Fall 2022, Roche ioffered the first semester of the Humanities Seminar, “Great Works of Literature and Culture from Homer to Dante.” Roche’s other fall course, “Philosophy and Film,” satisfied Notre Dame’s requirement for a second philosophy course. In Spring 2023 Roche taught his College Seminar on Faith, Doubt, and Reason and the second semester of the year-long Humanities Seminar for first-year students in the Glynn Family Honors Program, "Great Works of Literature and Culture from Machiavelli to the Present."
In Fall 2021 Roche taught “German 20202, German in the World,” which is the fourth-semester course in German, and “German Literary and Cultural Traditions,” which takes students from the Baroque era to 1945. In Spring 2022 he taught “Contemporary Germany” and “Challenges to Self, Society, and the Sacred: German Prose Masterpieces.”
Other courses in recent years have included German seminars on Comedy, Satire, and Humor and Tragedy, Comedy, Identity.
Undergraduate Courses
Roche has taught undergraduate courses in German language, literature, and culture, as well as broader courses. Sample courses:
- Comedy, Jokes, and Satire in the German-Speaking World
- Great Questions and the Liberal Arts
- Faith, Doubt, and Reason
- Religious Themes in Modern German Literature and Thought
- Austrian Literature from Grillparzer to Handke
- Weimar and the Third Reich in German Literature and Film
- Modern German Literature in Cultural Context
- Introduction to German Drama
Graduate Courses
Roche’s graduate courses have focused on German literature and intellectual history. Sample courses:
- The Idea of God’s Dependence on Humanity in German Literature and Culture
- Objective Idealism and the Study of Literature
- German Intellectual History from Kant to the Present
- Literature in the Age of Technology
- Tragedy and the Philosophy of Tragedy from Lessing to Hochhuth
- German Comedy from Lessing to Brecht
- Narrative Theory and the Interpretation of Fictional Narratives
- Aspects of Poetics, Rhetoric, and Stylistics: An Introduction to the Formal Study of Literature
Additional Syllabi
- Evil, Power, and Art from Plato to Hitchcock (Spring 2014)
- Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (Fall 2014)
- German Narratives (Spring 2014)
- Literature and Contradiction (Fall 2013)
- Comedy, Jokes, and Satire in the German-speaking World (Spring 2011)
- Masterpieces of German Cinema (Fall 2010)
- Great Questions and the Liberal Arts (Spring 2008)