Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić -- Introduction: Presence of the Body—Awareness in and beyond Experience / Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić -- Bodies and Their Matter / Leonida Kovač -- Losing the Plot: Inappropriate Fictions and the Art of the Theatre / Franc Chamberlain -- Examining Body Limits / Milica Ivić -- Ritualised Corporeality in Contemporary Croatian Art / Josip Zanki -- Body and Awareness as Reflected in the Wife of Bath: A Historical Study Based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales / Lidija Štrmelj -- Lost in Isolation: Ulrike Meinhof’s Body in Poetry / Karin Bauer -- Foreign Language—Foreign Body: The Embodiment of Sprachfremde in Dimitré Dinev’s Engelszungen and Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage / Anja K. Seiler -- Putting Hell on Paper: Chronic Pain Patients and the Challenge of Illness Narratives / Elisa Primavera-Lévy -- Neuroethical Reflections on Body and Awareness in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Ian McEwan’s Saturday / Sara Strauß -- Self, Interrupted: Body, Awareness, and Continuity in Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On / Tanja Reiffenrath -- Performances in the Anthropocene: Embodiment and Environment(s) in Ilija Trojanow’s Climate Change Novel / Sabine Wilke -- Disintegrating Identities: Bodily Presence in Contemporary Writing / Gert Hofmann -- Awe and Humility in the Face of Things: Somatic Practice in East-Asian Philosophies / Graham Parkes -- The Silent Performance of Mindfulness: Aware Corporeality / Corporeal Awareness of No-Self / Snježana Zorić -- Index / Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić.

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Presence of the Body provides an interdisciplinary forum for the dialogue between theory and practice about the impact of the body on human awareness in the fields of art, writing, meditative practice, and performance. This dialogue benefits from the neuro-systematic integration of “embodied” knowledge in the cognitive sciences, but it also suggests creative and transformative dynamics of embodiment which, beyond conceptualisation, emerge in sophisticated acts of writing, performing and meditating. Exploring the presence and experience character of the body-awareness relationship, a double perspective beyond cognitive fixations is suggested: 1) a body-centred touch of the world which inspires life as a creative ‘writing’ process, and 2) in line with Buddhist thought, an empty space of ‘pure presence’ from which all conscious processes originate.