GENRE AND STYLE SPECIFICITY OF UKRAINIAN BOOKTRAILERS ABOUT THE WAR

Abstract

The article examines a new genre of advertising media products – the booktrailer, and offers a refined definition of it: booktrailer is a genre of advertising media products that synthesizes verbal, visual, and audio elements to promote books through information technology. The genre and style specifics of contemporary Ukrainian booktrailers about the war are determined. The conditional chronological division of the studied booktrailerized texts about the war has been applied into those written before the full-scale invasion (S. Zhadan “Boarding School” (2017), T. Horikha Zernia “Dotsia” (2019)), and those created after it (N. Sukhorukova “Mariupol. Hope”, P. Vyshebaba “Just Don’t Write to Me About the War”, V. Stancyshyn “Emotional Swings of War”, O. Mykhed “Cat, Rooster, Locker”). Each booktrailer contains narrative elements. Their use depends on the content of the video and varies in length and nature of the narrative. The use of visual elements, such as color palette, graphics, photos, animation, or video, can help convey the style or mood of a book. Audio accompaniment – voiceover, audio recordings of interviews with writers, voiced fragments of the book’s text, music – carries both a semantic and emotional load. The popularity of booktrailers is driven by the surge in social media activity, as well as the sale of books in electronic format, which maximizes the logistics of the book to the reader: viewed the booktrailer → ordered the book → received it on an electronic medium. The linguistic specificity of booktrailers varies depending on the target audience and the genre of the book. The language used in book trailers for books about war is intended to convey the tension, emotionality, and tragic (or life-affirming) nature of events related to military conflict. The target audience of Ukrainian booktrailers for books about the war covers different categories of readers of different ages, interests, and social status, as the war is now affecting the entire population of Ukraine to some extent.