Progressive Poetics of Confusion (2011)

"In his most recent book, John C. O'Neal sets out to interpret the French Enlightenment project as a successful attempt to trouble the water, blur boundaries, and mix genres and forms in the very heart of the cultural order inherited from the classical age, an attempt that rejects dogmatism and fixed ways of thinking in order to create an epistemological framework capable of adequately assessing the complexity of human nature and all living things. …Studying as he does numerous different genres in the body of work under consideration, John C. O'Neal brilliantly affirms an eighteenth-century critical trend that is gaining traction.

—Dix-Huitième Siècle 45: 815-16 (trans. from the French) 

John C. O'Neal's book, while in many respects it fits with … recent scholarly approaches, does something otherwise unusual: it unearths and embraces in largely canonical writers and texts what the author deems with evident partisanship the progressive values of the French Enlightenment as such and finds in them the seeds of modernity—our modernity. Implicitly and at times explicitly responding to the critics of the Enlightenment, O'Neal's book might be called a revisionist history of the earlier revisionist histories. …[W]hat his study at its best exemplifies are the very rhetorical strategies that it explores: by muddling what we might have thought settled, it makes us reconsider the familiar with newly queer eyes.

—Eighteenth-Century Fiction 26(2): 305-08

"[O'Neal] pluralises our understanding of the eighteenth by showing the extent to which writers took interest in the irrational, complexity, and confusion.  ...lucid and often counter-intuitive readings.  ...O'Neal peppers his argument with subtly iconoclastic interpretations of some canonical texts."  

—French History 26 (3): 428-29

Seeing and Observing (1985)

"...this book constitutes a welcome contribution to Rousseau studies: it is effectively structured around a unifying theme, its critical approach is generally sound and unimpeachable, and it is written in a clear and readable style. The author has also read widely and well.  …Perception, or the transition from beholding to understanding in Rousseau, is what essentially preoccupies Dr. O'Neal, and it is his contention that critics and commentators have failed to acknowledge fully the crucial importance, indeed, the centrality of this one area in the writer's thought. There is no doubt that Rousseau's own concept of perception can help to explain more clearly his attitude towards such key problems as the self and society, nature and culture.  John O'Neal's study rests on the solid foundation of a thorough familiarity with the essential primary sources, and most up-to-date secondary sources, and it further demonstrates wide-ranging yet discriminating readings in modern literary criticism and theory.

—Modern Language Review 82 (4): 961-62

This is a useful, thought-provoking book.  It contains important quotations relevant to its main theme from virtually all of Rousseau’s major works.  In perusing Professor O’Neal’s study, one is amazed anew by the implications and influences of Rousseau’s writings in all of the humanities and human sciences.

—Romance Quarterly 34 (4): 481-82

This book is most valuable for its appetizing references to philosophical theories of perception, and for some fine readings of Rousseau, particularly of the autobiographical works.

—French Studies 40 (4): 466

Approaches to Teaching Rousseau’s Confessions and Reveries (2003)

Changing Minds (2002)

John C. O'Neal's first two books established their author as a leading interpreter of the French Enlightenment, at home on both sides of the border between literary and intellectual history. Seeing and Observing: Rousseau's Rhetoric of Perception (1985) analyzed the epistemological foundations of Rousseau's writing, turning on the key concept of “perception.” The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment (1996) was a wide-ranging survey, tracing the fortunes of the major French contribution to the theory of knowledge. With Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth-Century France, O’Neal maintains this focus on epistemology, while casting his thematic net still further. His topic here is nothing less than the dialectic between “nature” and “culture” themselves, though with “perception” again at the center of the story.

—H-France Review 11 (221): 1-2

This was my favorite of the four books [under review].  …The book reveals a tension in the Enlightenment: between efforts to flatten out the Chain of Being and efforts to preserve humanity’s intellectual superiority.  This struck me as a serious insight into modern Western thought.  I have few reservations about giving this book a high rating for both coherence and significance.

—Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 (2): 317-23 

The Authority of Experience (1996)

“Richly evocative, this book is well worth reading. More than simply accomplishing its clearly-stated agenda, which was a complex task, requiring close knowledge of numerous, difficult texts, it refreshingly opens the door to new ideas, new questions and new possible connections.”

—French Review 72 (4): 753-54

O’Neal details the intricacies of the Sensationist project confidently and with much skill ...[and] builds a clear and compelling picture throughout from closely-observed readings of the key texts.  …These are rich and illuminating readings, and the basic case is persuasively made.  …The Authority of Experience is an illuminating and far-reaching study that should add considerably to an understanding of the relationship between philosophical inquiry and literature during the Enlightenment.

—Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (3): 398-99

"...an informational trove for an important--a very important--strain of Enlightenment thought."  

—1650-1850 5: 378-84

The Nature of Rousseau’s Rêveries (2008)

Literature and Perception (1984)