John C. O’Neal has written an excellent book on the uses of the concept of confusion in the French Enlightenment. O’Neal begins by deconstructing the traditional image of the Enlightenment as a period obsessed with reason, rationality, and order. . .Throughout this relatively short work, O’Neal provides lucid and often counter-intuitive readings of Marivaux’s La double insonstance and Le jeu ... Read morede l’amour et du hasard, Crébillon fils’s Les égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste and Lettre sur les aveugles, Voltaire’s Candide, and Rousseau’s Lettres à d’Alembert sur les spectacles. O’Neal peppers his argument with subtly iconoclastic interpretations of some canonical texts.
Oxford Journal
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.  He contributes in this way to the deconstruction of Cassirer's reading of Kant and thereby promotes an empirical and skeptical approach to the thinking of the French Enlightenment. . . .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
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