How To Use Allusive In A Sentence

  • Mann says it's a strange thing with the fulfilment of prophecies, they often confirm themselves allusively rather than literally.
  • A fair portion of contemporary poetry over-relies on self-reflexive irony, tonal detachment, and an often irritating allusive erudition.
  • A species of Ling is called sometimes the burbot, but it lives in fresh water; and this is also called the coney fish, and supposed to be allusive in the following arms.
  • Deliberately, the colour has little force, but this is compensated for by its allusive subtlety.
  • Chopin's Preludes return independence to the hands in order to display a new kind of allusive dialogue between them.
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  • Taking an unexpected hand in the fortunes of cinematic renegades, the French designer agnès b. aka Agnès Andrée Marguerite Troublé has given financial backing to such bold and divisive filmmakers as Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noé, and conceived the allusively chic attire worn by Uma Thurman and John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction. Bidding a Very Long Farewell to Hungary's Film Hero
  • It's a densely allusive, punning, always associative flow that manages to keep its narrative movement alive with dizzying glances in all directions along the way.
  • That allusive, indirect style Westlake assigns to himself gives him plenty of room and time to wander away from his plot and work in wry but dead-on descriptions of people and how they live, the work they do, the things they surround themselves with, the places they go, their eccentricities and vanities and various insanities. Drowned Hopes
  • Again and commonly, physical beauty enjoys a symbolic and allusive function in these Anglo-Saxon texts.
  • Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again. Poetry
  • They are terse, allusive, disconnected, apothegmatic and hard to follow.
  • If so, the euphony is, for Conrad, not just thoroughly but almost allusively Romantic. Phonemanography: Romantic to Victorian
  • Above all, they are gestures by which the poet and the reader may together, through a sequence of allusive suggestions and corresponding recognitions, infuse the written text with breath.
  • It is a misfortune that the text of the history of Ammianus Marcellinus, which introduces this episode, is defective, and that only allusive back references survive.
  • The allusiveness requires us to attend to the internal structure of the text, and at the same time asks us to step outside it, to other texts.
  • Graphite hits the retina in allusive ways, and in these drawings, broad tonal variety and the use of both white and buff sheets simulate chroma.
  • If you can stand the obliqueness, the allusiveness and the tension-inducing pace, you are in for an experience that is disturbing, revelatory and poetic.
  • Irvine's previous novel, A Scattering of Jades, combined Mammoth Cave, Aaron Burr, and P.T. Barnum with Aztec mummies and the Millerite apocalypse; it felt heftier than OKOS does, and its magic captured the True Powers Feel of "I know how this works, but if I told you straight out your eyes would melt, so I'm just going to describe it allusively" somewhat better. Kenneth Hite's Journal
  • There are mixed modes here also, as in the use of the term sacrifice — the word has a temporary allusive reference to a Mosaical figure of speech. The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans: Essays and Dissertations
  • There are kinds of subtlety and metaphorical allusiveness that are easier to achieve in comics than in novels.
  • What tends to happen instead is the kind of coy allusiveness coupled with total transparency of motive you meet, for example, in The Black Star, where our heroes most improbably find a light aircraft in which to escape the overrun city: A Great Disturbance in the Plot « Gerry Canavan
  • It is a allegation in adjustment to accept a allusive Military career for you to accouter yourself and butt a specialization whether it is in the army, navy, or air force. MyLinkVault Newest Links
  • In some ways the poem is the closest thing he would write to the method and manner of Eliot, with its mysterious, fragmentary dialogue and allusive range.
  • His new play, Arcadia, is as intricate, elaborate and allusive as anything he has yet written.
  • There are mixed modes here also, as in the use of the term sacrifice, — the word has a temporary allusive reference to a Mosaical figure of speech. Theological Essays of the Late Benjamin Jowett: Seleted, Arranged, and Edited by Lewis Campbell
  • The story remains the same - wildly improbable and allusively rendered - but the music has inflated and deepened in a manner befitting the giant robots, imploding planets, and freaky cast of thousands it contains.
  • Trying too hard to be symbolic and trendily allusive, it collapses under the weight of its ambitions.
  • Praising Jansenism or the products of its teaching remained an allusive way to proclaim the need for an animating conviction to invigorate liberal principles.
  • But it's a perfect example of the strange and allusive poetry he brings to even the most conventional of subjects, such as his portrait of an archer, which seems to be both more and less than a portrait.
  • In opening with an anonymous voice, only later identified, we are immediately plunged into the allusive narrative style which characterises this novel.
  • Jarmusch is the director who puts the loose in "allusive" and the lipstick in "elliptical"; I fully recognize his movies aren't to everybody's taste. News & Politics
  • The second species of accommodation, called allusive, is often a mere play on words and at times seems due to a misunderstanding of the original meaning. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 1: Aachen-Assize
  • Paglia (correctly) emphasizes the way in which English is constantly changing -- which makes it an ever-renewable source of new kinds of writing -- but she ought to consider this when elevating the Romantic poets '"living speech" over "dense allusiveness and preciosity. Poetry
  • He is able to construct space through the juxtaposition of colors and to play with allusive reference.
  • In his strange digressive and allusive biography of Christ he presents him as the incarnation of the overwhelming mystery of God.
  • Wizon's titles are evocative and allusive, and it is only via their suggestions that one can begin to read the touches of color in terms of imagery.
  • 'prays in aid of similes,' -- that this is a specimen of what he calls elsewhere 'allusive' writing. The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded
  • Here, the estranging inexplicability of the actual is most viscerally approached, not through any feeble attempt at representation, but through the bizarre allusiveness of the fictive.
  • In a tentative way information was supplied; she spoke allusively of her school, of her examination successes, of her gladness that the days of “Cram” were over. Twelve Stories and a Dream, by H. G. Wells
  • I direct students to the rich allusiveness of his work, his careful craftsmanship, and his often hidden meanings. Interview With Professor Jeanne Campbell Reesman
  • Her allusive serial art makes use of pairings, sequences and minutes compositional shifts.
  • She uses non-realistic devices from fairy tale and a playful allusiveness to other texts in both dialogue and third-person narration.
  • A Cloudy and rainy Day, staid at home; spent the day Writing, Reading and Chatting -- I think it observable that our Language is more and more sliding into modes of expression allusive and allegorical, approximating to the eastern stile -- Professional Men, Lawyers, Seamen, Soldiers Journal of a Tour to North Carolina by William Attmore, 1787
  • It's a densely allusive, punning, always associative flow that manages to keep its narrative movement alive with dizzying glances in all directions along the way.
  • -- lyrical, allusive, unconsoled -- is this sense of belatedness, a mood that is not nostalgia but is instead a kind of unreconciled yearning for the present. Powell's Books: Overview
  • Allusive, or parabolical, is a narration applied only to express some special purpose or conceit; which latter kind of parabolical wisdom was much more in use in the ancient times, as by the fables of AEsop, and the brief sentences of the seven, and the use of hieroglyphics may appear. The Advancement of Learning
  • Great Regulars: In my experience, pastiche, hyper-allusiveness and associative logic contribute just as much to the texture of everyday communication as they do to making up postmodern literature and "Simpsons" episodes and Mitsubishi commercials. Archive 2009-05-01
  • Mr. Bellow's prose is energetic and torrential; his voice learned and allusive.
  • Yet Moffatt makes the point allusively, in a whisper entirely in keeping with the tone of the work.
  • After the likes of such instruments as guitars, drums, bass guitar, and harmonica, the band whipped out the allusive Australian didgeridoo.
  • Both make allusive abstract forms that can suggest seedpods, cells or constellations, and both work in a generous scale with a sensitive touch.
  • There's something allusively pornographic about the role of delivery guy. Archive 2006-01-01
  • Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again. Poetry
  • Superstition and Revelation is as echoic -- as allusive, if you will -- as any text in Hemans. Hemans, Heber, and _Superstition and Revelation_
  • As an essayist, he conveys similar purpose, putting across his thoughts in a lively, questioning, allusive and often self-deprecatory way.
  • While the poetry is cryptic, allusive and ambiguous, the prose is lucid, oracular, loftily self-assured.
  • Paglia (correctly) emphasizes the way in which English is constantly changing -- which makes it an ever-renewable source of new kinds of writing -- but she ought to consider this when elevating the Romantic poets '"living speech" over "dense allusiveness and preciosity. Poetry
  • What tends to happen instead is the kind of coy allusiveness coupled with total transparency of motive you meet, for example, in The Black Star, where our heroes most improbably find a light aircraft in which to escape the overrun city: A Great Disturbance in the Plot « Gerry Canavan
  • However, in two cantatas in book 3 allusive figuration recurs in a manner that indubitably aids the drama.
  • Designer Susan Benson imparts the allusive quality of a Japanese watercolour, and Michael Whitfield beautifully recreates changing natural light.
  • While the poetry is cryptic, allusive and ambiguous, the prose is lucid, oracular, loftily self-assured.
  • Mangold's curled figure proves a curiously allusive and vulnerable emblem as it unfurls across one, two or three panels, nearing but never quite touching the edges of the support.
  • Another, less-remarked problem, is that the extraordinary allusiveness of his prose is the product of a kind of education which no longer exists.
  • After six seasons, Lost ended as it began, shrouded in an aura of pronounced mysterioso, its insistence on being elusive and allusive with regard to its central mythology either endlessly beguiling or endlessly irritating. William Bradley: Time Slips Away for 24 and Lost in Very Different Finales
  • A fair portion of contemporary poetry over-relies on self-reflexive irony, tonal detachment, and an often irritating allusive erudition.
  • The ‘welcome’ signs, artfully disposed, make it clear that hospitality is merely an allusive flavor; they are in no wise meant to be taken literally.
  • These are the lost poems of the lost modernist, David Jones, a man whose allusive obscurity won him fans like Eliot and Auden but robbed him of his place in college curricula.
  • The aigrette, which is a sort of artificial plume, or feather, represents a hand with thirteen fingers, covered with diamonds; allusive to the thirteen ships taken and destroyed by the hero: and it's size is that of a child's hand, at the age of five or six years, when open. The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Volume 1
  • allusive speech is characterized by allusions
  • Phillips likes to write allusive portraits peppered with images he can wrap his warm, grainy voice around, like the slowly-rolling Far End of the Night or the feistier Calamity Jane.
  • DreamWorks, in particular, has made the kind of allusive, parodic cultural self-consciousness that used to be called postmodernism safe for the whole family. NYT > Home Page
  • Christian's works are secretive yet allusive, related yet solitary and, above all, tactile and handmade.
  • Cultural criticism, by contrast, not only valorizes the refractoriness, opacity, and allusive metaphoricity of the avant-garde aesthetic, it also incarnates these same qualities.
  • He's in a Gotham City (the very name allusive of the word gothic, if not outright derived from it) graveyard, in fact, at the grave of Batman, the mainstream superhero of the DC universe most easily associated with horror--from the very concept of his character and its association with vampires (an association made literal in comics from Red Rain to Nosferatu), it's hardly an accident that he's the superhero who appeared in Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's macabre early issues of Swamp Thing. Archive 2009-08-02
  • His new play, Arcadia, is as intricate, elaborate and allusive as anything he has yet written.
  • Every phrase had to be understood allusively rather than at face value, based on the assumption that all readers had read and memorized the same 30-volume library. Languagehat.com: WRITTEN VERNACULARS IN ASIA.
  • Time is simultaneously the star and an extra, protagonist and antagonist, the crescendo and the anti-climax, the narrative and an abstraction, the subject and the subtext - it's tangible and yet allusive. Rebecca Taylor: Christian Marclay Conquers Time
  • These rambles take the author, briefly and allusively, through a great many topics other than his primary concern with taste.
  • There is something about the style of these thinkers, its gaps, its allusiveness, its suggestiveness, and so on that makes it highly fit for cultural circulation. Archive 2009-07-01
  • If you're going to take on an author as indirect and allusive as James, then it might be good to try for indirection and allusiveness.
  • Equally allusive is his palette, which, despite being dominated by green, looks completely unnatural.
  • Life stories, in other words, are not intended for indiscriminate public consumption, nor would they be immediately comprehensible beyond a narrator's social circle, given their often-unnamed cast of characters and the situations they allusively describe. Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique
  • Chopin's Preludes return independence to the hands in order to display a new kind of allusive dialogue between them.
  • Vaughn Bode himself is allusively depicted on page forty-three, and I think he would be proud to find himself in these colorful funny pages. Asimov's Science Fiction
  • The heavy-handed allusiveness may just be an aesthetic mistake, a secondary flaw we have to countenance while otherwise acknowledging the narrative power of the novel as a whole. Translated Texts
  • Findlay is sympathetic to the self-referential and allusive nature of the play, Shakespeare's most mature comedy, and makes no attempt at realism.
  • Number 11 is a baroquely plotted, densely allusive, heart-on-his-sleeve, state-of-the-nation satire. Times, Sunday Times
  • And if the cover art foreshadows the style of this gargantuan cotton-candy novel, the title poised between horse and skyline suggests the allusive, striving nature of the themes to come: Shakespeare's romance of resurrection will be only the most conspicuous swatch in a patchwork of Renaissance fairy tale, Victorian saga, Vonnegutian fable, and dreamy surrealism in the Latin American manner. Small Expectations
  • Approaching the texts in a suggestive and allusive manner, they draw on their own poetic experience to elucidate the texts.
  • Ackerman declines to discuss her own emotional resume, but does say airily, "I was born with a poet's sensibility, and Prozac made it impossible for me to do what comes naturally -- think metaphorically, allusively, exploring the hidden connection between seemingly unrelated things. Book Marks
  • You can't hide behind an elaborate form or allusive obscurity. Brian Hall - An interview with author
  • As well as Joyce there was TS Eliot, whose densely allusive poem The Waste Land prompted such perplexity that the poet felt prompted to provide his own notes.
  • While Grosvenor's dramatically cantilevered sculptures disturbed space in an almost physical manner, like a speeding boat's wake, his recent pieces activate space allusively and emotionally.
  • While Mr. Eliot's early poems, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), had brought him considerable attention in literary circles, it was "The Waste Land" (1922), a fragmentary and highly allusive verse epic, that gave him his central position in British and American poetry. Where Time and the Timeless Intersect
  • His poetry gives evidence of a bookish and extremely thoughtful life while encountering the forms and rituals of cultures without literatures — West African, Mexican and Central American — as well as the writers — Augustine, Goethe, Rilke, David Hume, Hugh MacDiarmid — whose traces we find allusively placed throughout his work. A mess of errors : Stephen Burt : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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