conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Introducing Barthes about Barthes, Introducing with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Introducing Barthes brilliantly explains Barthes' application of these ideas to literature and popular culture, and shows why he was a key figure in the structuralist movement.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Introducing Barthes
  AND IT WAS ANOTHER ATTRACTIVE FEATURE OF JAPANESE CULTURE THAT IT WAS TOTALLY FREE OF THE CONDEMNATION WHICH JUDEO-CHRISTIANITY, ALONE OF ALL THE MAJOR RELIGIONS, HAD ALWAYS EXPRESSED OF THIS PARTICULAR TYPE OF SEXUAL ACTIVITY.
  But above all, he rejoiced in the presence of a sign system which was totally different from the one which prevailed in Europe. Nobody, he argued, looking at Japanese writing, could see it as embodying what he called "a metaphysics of presence".
  NOBODY COULD ENTERTAIN THE TYPICALLY WESTERN IDEA THAT LANGUAGE IS GIVEN BY GOD AS A DIVINELY SANCTIONED MEANS OF COMMUNICATING EXPERIENCE. 
  One of the features which distinguishes human beings from the other animals, Barthes maintained, was the fact of their having had a childhood, and in the personal note which he allowed to come into the later part of his work, he provided more and more details of how this was true in his case.
  Barthes had a childhood dominated by genteel poverty. His widowed mother, Henriette, had to go out to work to provide money for herself and her son. Barthes gives a movingly honest account of how sad he was at the separation this implied.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'The verb "to ravish", as it is used to describe what the Romans did when they carried off the Sabine women in order to make them their brides, had also in Barthes' view a different meaning, and one which is emotionally more profound'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The verb "to ravish", as it is used to describe what the Romans did when they carried off the Sabine women in order to make them their brides, had also in Barthes' view a different meaning, and one which is emotionally more profound. For when I am "ravished" at the sight of another person, it means that I lose control of myself at the sight of the person I love.
  As in the case of money, Barthes maintains, the ideologies which seek to dominate our lives also try to do so by devaluing both sex itself and the love and pleasure which it can bring with it.
  FOR **CHRISTIANITY** , THE LOVE OF HUMAN BEINGS IS ONLY AN IMPERFECT FORM OF THE LOVE OF GOD, AND MUST BE ABANDONED IN FAVOUR OF IT. 
  WHILE FOR **FREUDIANISM** , THE PROBLEMS SEX BRINGS WITH IT ARE SO INNUMERABLE THAT IT IS HARD TO SEE WHAT A MATURE AND SATISFYING SEXUAL LIFE COULD EVER BE!
  The great disadvantage of the three ideologies which dominated the 20th century is that each one of them pronounces a curse on money.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'To write about Barthes in the style exemplified by Orwell or Bertrand Russell is, for his admirers, a total betrayal of his work'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: To write about Barthes in the style exemplified by Orwell or Bertrand Russell is, for his admirers, a total betrayal of his work. It is as though one were trying to explain Einstein in terms of Newtonian physics, or Darwin in the language of the Old Testament.
  If you are going to be assessed by one of his admirers, whether in an examination or a prepared essay, **do not** write about Barthes in the way I do.
  Do not do as I have done and try to reduce him to the simplistic, immediately comprehensible notions of middle-class English empiricism.
  Do not, above all, try to translate his style of thinking and writing into the ordinary language so favoured by the society which defeated the student uprising of 1968.