The archive as a topological space: critical contributions of a category to think about a digital literary archive

Abstract

Julio Cortázar Digital Archive, which was constituted in the CRLA-Archives (Poitiers University, France), raises the need for its conceptual reflection to be described and organized given the new access and consulting options in the digital format.

In 2019, the reception of a large material donation from Gladis Anchieri-Yurkievich, first member of Julio Cortázar Found, implied a theoretical challenge because it is part of a set or series, which is located “in parallel” and in connection with the thematic universe linked to Cortázar. Therefore, we are interested in questions about “reading places” and “resource integration”. Thus, we will define the “topological space” as a reflective category that makes it possible to describe these dialogues because its basic notion relates to the analysis of the figure’s properties in a space as it is the archive. This notion is born from the contributions of mathematics and it was used by authors such as Michel Foucault, Iuri Lotman, Frederic Jameson and Boris Groys.

We decided to demonstrate how we adopted it as an epistemological key that includes the incorporation of the convergence and topological connectivity notions as a description of the relationship between the documents that a user finds in his search. We think that reading displacements, multidimensional searches, could be described in a framework that shapes new figures, empowered by the possibilities given by the informatics virtuality.