The piece that I will be critically evaluating is “Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales” by Edward Falco. This piece combines mock “photographs” of landscapes with “tales” that are meant to parallel the feelings and ideas suggested by the photographs. This piece is not an example of legitimate writing because its purpose is really to create a feeling visually rather than intellectually, it contains minimal amounts of written words, and it doesn’t follow a specific direction or plot.
Birkerts would also disagree with the idea that this piece is an example of a legitimate piece of writing. In his book, The Gutenberg Elegies, he says “…this is the problem facing the fiction writer in our time. Not only must he figure out what to do about the flatness of quotidian experience, but he must also deal with the fact that the greater part of human activities – which once may have stood out in relief – now take place on many tracks at once, with the individual in a state of distracted absorption” (206). Birkerts would likely argue that this piece has too much going on, in too many different mediums, to be considered a “literary text,” as he sees texts as linear, with a set beginning and end. The introdution to this piece on the website collection.eliterature.org describes the experience of viewing this piece as “like walking through a field: readers begin at any one of several different starting points, wander around as long as they like, and then exit wherever and whenever they choose.”
One counter-argument that I could anticipate is that this text is worthy of study because of the fact that it uses writing to make the reader think. Furthermore, it allows for different people to read it and interpret it in different ways. However, I would argue that these qualities make it more like artwork than like a literary text.
the art vs. literary seems crucial–you will need to define those terms a bit and how in your view literature can’t be exclusively visual (or visual at all?) good quotation from birkerts to work with.