The Stories Behind Liminal Spaces & Pastoral Settings

“their pastoral realm is not really so pastoral at all but rather a liminal world that is both natural and constructed.”

-Deanna Shemek

The quote above is from Professor Schemek's essay “Chapter Ten Genre and Mode” in the Humanities Core Handbook on Bocaccio's Decameron. It inspired the creation and direction I decided to take for this page in applying this way of thinking to both the Decameron and my current world here at UCI. It challenged me to identify pastoral and liminal worlds in the current place I live, UCI, and explore how I want to engage with it.

From Day 4 Story 1 of The Decameron

A Pastoral Setting w/ Typical Pastoral Features (Sheep, Nature, etc)

Another Examples Of A Pastoral Setting w/ More People

Pastoral

Pastoral, used as a setting, genre or mode is typically characterized by nature, life on the countryside and shepherds men. When used in literature and even in paintings, pastoral is used as a means to not only contrast urban life, but at times even escape it. This is because pastoral life is viewed as idyllic, almost as a heaven on Earth, free from all the worries of the real world.

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Pastoral in The Decameron

In The Decameron, a group of 10 men and women referred to as the brigata, leave the city of Florence for the countryside escaping the pestilence and fear surrounding the plague. With no particular destination in mind, the brigata go from house to house, in the countryside. Each house they visit has a garden where they sit around and tell stories. This transition from the urban city to the countryside featuring extravagant gardens, animals and overall serenity is dramatic. With the change in setting there's an automatic change in tone mood of the characters and description of the scenery. The brigata was utilizing the countryside (pastoral setting) as a means of escape from the reality of the plague.

Aldrich park A Pastoral Realm

In the same way that the countryside pastoral setting serves as an escape from plague and reality in The Decameron, Alrich Park, located in the middle of the campus of the University of California Irvine serves as the student's pastoral and escape. Filled with trees, grass, flowers and even animals like ducks, Aldrich Park serves as an escape into a smaller world free from the stress of midterms and college which you could label as the urban setting. While UCI itself isn't a pastoral setting, aspects of it like Aldrich Park are.

Liminal Spaces

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Liminal: According to the Oxford English Dictionary liminal is an adjective, “Characterized by being on a boundary or threshold, esp. by being transitional or intermediate between two states, situations, etc.”

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Liminal Spaces are areas that serve as a literal or metaphorical mid-point or transition space between two points.

People Crossing the Streets New York City as a Midpoint Between Two Streets

Liminal Spaces in The Decameron

In the same way that the countryside serves as a pastoral setting for the brigata in The Decameron, the gardens of the extravagant homes in the countryside that the brigata temporarily inhabits functions as a liminal space between the urban city and the countryside. The urban city ridden with death and corpses from the plague is the past and the countryside abundant with fresh air and nature is the brigata's present, both alternate realities. In the garden, a place that incorporated both the urban city and countryside where storytelling took place, functioned as a way to vicariously live through fictional characters and a nonreality, a liminal space.

The Brigata Storytelling In One Of The Palace's Gardens

Students Passing By The UCI Student Center To Get To Their Classes

An Empty UCI Student Center After A Rainy Day

As any fresh high school graduate I was presented with the choice of college or going straight into adulthood, that is paying rent, having a 9am to 5pm job, working 5 days a week, etc. I chose to postpone a complete transition into adulthood by attending college specifically UCI. Instead of jumping from being a young adult with minimal responsibility to an adult with every responsibility you can imagine, I chose UCI as this liminal space between those two phases. Where depending on whether you're an undergraduate or graduate student you'll spend the next 2-5 years, not being considered a full adult and instead preparing for it with a much supposed higher success rate.

UCI as a liminal space

A UCI Campus Tour via A Drone

When you look at UCI in the more literal sense that being the campus's physical characteristics, structure and architecture, you notice this fusion of nature and an urban city. As you can see in the drone video above walking through UCI's campus, there are 6-story buildings accompanied by a grassy terrain and trees ranging in size. This suburban esc and contrast between nature and urban city coexisting creates a liminal space, an intermediary. Coming from an urban city myself, lacking grass and fresh air, as a liminal space, UCI is the perfect middle ground between a bustling city and countryside in featuring aspects of both environments.

An Overhead View Of The UCI Campus

My Special and Not So Special Places at UCI

Reflection

In completing this activity, it made me think of what I want my next 4 years at UCI to look like. Because while UCI is inherently a liminal space, it doesn't mean that I have in interact with it in that way, as something temporary. So far at UCI I've seen students treat it as a liminal space by not interacting with it and others recognize it is one but interact with by going to events and joining clubs. Like various upperclassmen at UCI told me at the start of the Fall Quarter, you get what you put in. If all you do as a student is go to class and never decide to explore UCI, your college experience is going to be boring. I want my next 4 years at UCI to be one that I'll remember for the rest of my life. Where I've changed, grown, discovered all the different settings UCI has to offer such as Aldrich Park's pastoral setting, and felt like I've contributed to the school in some meaningful way.

Works Cited

Bocaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron (Norton Critical Edition). Edited and translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn. Norton, 2016

CampusMania. “University of California, Irvine | UC Irvine | 8K Campus Drone Tour.” YouTube, YouTube, 1 June 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dHN6R8z0lA.

Giannopoulou, Z. (2022, October). Timing Politics. Humanities Core Fall 2022. University of California Irvine; University of California Irvine.

“Liminal.” Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/108471?redirectedFrom=liminal+#eid.

Shemek, Deanna. “Chapter Ten Genre and Mode .” Humanities Core Handbook Worldbuilding 2022-2023, edited by Tamara Beauchamp, University of California Irvine, 2022, p. 110.

Shemek, D. (2022, October). Getting Physical and Spiritual in Bocaccio's Decameron Day 3. Humanities Core Fall 2022. University of California Irvine; University of California Irvine.

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