THE PRAYER BOOK AS A CURE. A GENRE STUDY

The article is devoted to the analysis of an innovative form of the prayer book. It has been given the form of an artifact similar to the cure. In this way it implies a reference to the metaphor THE PRAYER BOOK IS A CURE. The entirety of the material is treated in the analyses as a collection of genres of unusual contours. The genre characteristics includes the following types of utterances: a collection of texts on a package, a leaflet for the patient and a proper prayer book. The first two types are a contamination of utilitarian genres presenting a cure and catechetical or cult genres, whereas the prayer book refers to the modernized versions of the genre. The author treats the entirety (a collection of utterances) as communication stylized to form an advertisement, yet in the communication sense and not the generic one. A collection of diverse utterances is (just like advertisements): appealing, suggestive, comprehensible and easy to remember. Perceiving the prayer book in terms of a cure and giving it the external form of the medicine results in creation of a new formula of the genre. The genre code of the prayer book has been expanded and supplemented with new exponents. The catechetical discourse (including the integral catechesis) has gained new carriers of persuasiveness by the reference to the advertising discourse.