Technical Literary Gobbledygook Quiz

Answer: Iambic pentameter

Poetry is a bother in my opinion. It may be the only instance where you'll find that feet are measurements in a meter. Seriously. One meter of classical poetry typically consists of five feet and each foot consists of two stressed/unstressed syllables.

The typical sonnet is written in pentameter ('penta-' denotes five feet) and its prosody determines whether or not it's iambic. Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18", for example, can be read as iambic: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" with clear emphasis placed on 'I', '-pare', 'to' 'sum-' and 'day'.

Obviously, not all poetry is iambic- it'd get boring and repetitive (and, dare I say, banal). Other rhythmic devices may be seen:
Trochees are the opposite of iambs; they have a stressed, then unstressed syllable. This can be seen in the line "Peter, Peter pumpkin-eater" (which is tetrameter, I may say).
Spondees are two stressed syllables in a foot while a pyrrhic is two unstressed syllables in a foot. Both are typically less common (though frequently used by Tennyson).

Okay...enough of poetry for now.

Answer: By the use of the word 'like'

Metaphors and similes fall into the same type of category; both relate to comparisons of two different things. In the case of the first paragraph of the question, 'Metaphors are like walnuts', a simile is clearly visible as it makes use of the word 'like' or 'as' to compare metaphors to walnuts.

If I'd used a metaphor, I'd have said that 'metaphors are walnuts'. We all know that metaphors aren't walnuts, but an analogy is made between the two as they bear some sort of resemblance in a sense.

See...even if you have nut allergies, you can still handle metaphors. And similes for that matter.

Answer: Toot

If you got it right, you get a 'Ding!'
If you got it wrong, you get a 'Buzz!'

Onomatopoeia is a word that sounds like what it describes. In other words, many animal sounds, like 'Quack' and 'Meow', fall into this category because they sound like what they are. 'Pop' and 'Toot' also do this, clearly.

But I also tried to trick you, didn't I? 'Pop', 'Toot', 'Radar', 'Noon', 'Civic', and 'Kayak' are all palindromes. These are words which can be spelled the same forwards and backwards. They don't even need to be words either. They can be numbers, musical arrangements, molecular models of DNA, and other things I find to be infinitely more complicated than English.

And then there's 'walnut', our buzzword of the day, which is neither the former nor the latter technique. Shame, really.

Answer: Couplet

If a limerick can be funny, a couplet is two-fifths as funny. ;)
Couplets, quite simply, are two lines of poetry which have end-rhymes in each. In that sense, a couplet is never lonely because each line always has its corresponding mate. Aw.

Couplets you may know include the entirety of Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" and a large number of rap hits on the radio. In fact, noting sonnets again, every Shakespearean sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. See- it all comes full circle!

Answer: Dénouement

While some stories omit the Dénouement in favour of a more abrupt conclusion (for example, William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" offers no major explanations to conclude the piece), this plot point is quite common in fictional works big and small. Think of every mystery novel you've ever read. If you were to read Agatha Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", you'd find that the revelation of the killer is the climax while the Falling Action and Dénouement would include Detective Poirot's explanation and evidence and send him on his merry way.
In essence, the Dénouement serves to let the reader down easy...and movies do it too. When the Dénouement is left out, it's on purpose; you're meant to feel the jolt.
If your story has no Climax on the other hand, you're probably reading something drier than the ingredients on a jar of walnuts.

Answer: A narrative about the growth of an artist

For all of our German fans out there, the 'Künstlerroman' is broken into two parts: 'Künstler' is the German word for 'Artist' while 'Roman' is a 'Novel'. Because of this, the 'Künstlerroman' is a novel in which an artist matures throughout the narrative.

The Künstlerroman does not appear as often as one may think- at least not as often as the Bildungsroman- but it does appear every once in a while. James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" come to mind as Modernist takes on the genre. The Bildungsroman, on the other hand, is a lot more common in children's literature, particularly Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island".

In regards to "a narrative in which the main character decreases in maturity, reverting from adulthood to youth", F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" as a short story back in 1922. I don't think we have a term for that one (...and don't count Academy Award Winner).

Answer: Utopia

Coincidentally, the translation for the word 'Utopia' (in Greek) can be read as both 'not place' and 'good place'. In other words, it's a place that does not exist. As Thomas More wrote in his novel sixteenth-century novel, "Utopia", this type of world is idyllic and arguably, there is no such thing as a Utopia as most either carry a fatal flaw or rest on a very fine balance.

Instead, you're more likely to see novels with Dystopian views crop up in our (pessimistic) book collections. Works by Huxley, Orwell, and (the more contemporary) Margaret Atwood touch on disturbing futures in fiction while TV shows such as "Jericho" and "Dollhouse" and movies like "The Terminator" and "District 9" imply doom on the horizon. As such, Dystopian works often fall into the science fiction category. Nonetheless, Dystopian novels play a big role in shifting viewpoints and attentions to our unknown futures and remain very influential in literary circles (and elsewhere). It's no surprise that many dystopian novels (e.g. "1984", "Brave New World", "The Handmaid's Tale", etc.) have been on ban lists in the past.

Answer: Similar consonant sounds in words written next to one another

Assonance and Consonance, while rarely considered by non-English scholars, play a large role in rhythm and tone of a piece. While, as noted, Assonance is similar vowel sounds (like "sweet dreams"), Consonance is similar consonant sounds. This can apply within a line of poetry, like if you wrote the words "coming home", or it can simply refer to two similarly-written words in which only the vowel is different (e.g. "Wander" and "Wonder").

In this sense, both Assonance and Consonance can be Alliteration. A lot of these sorts of techniques are found in music specifically as the greater effect is heard rather than read.

Answer: It was a tie

An English major (who holds deep affection for 400-year-old literature for some reason) will always tell you that construction of poetry is key to its perfection as an art. Less dramatic people will simply say that while Shakespeare and Spenser used different rhyme schemes, the competition would always end in a tie. Every one of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and Spenser's handful of sonnets consists of fourteen lines.

In addition, both use iambic pentameter meaning that each poem consists of 14 meters...or 70 feet...or 140 syllables...and all with alternating stresses. Of course, by the time the 20th century rolled around, poets started getting wise to the whole idea, decided that concepts of 'identity' were better left fragmented, and changed the pleasant rhythms of the sonnet to suit their needs. Selfish if you ask me.

Then again, I'm less dramatic.

Answer: Yes

While many won't recognize second-person narration, it's simply because most significant works don't utilize this point of view in which the pronoun "you" is used frequently to refer to the reader outside the novel.

If you've ever read a guide book, you know what I'm talking about- the reader can interpret themselves as a character while the narrator associates themselves as a connection between reader and novel. If you've ever done a 'Choose Your Own Adventure', you've already run through the course of one of these.

Regardless, the most you'll likely find will be in the first and third-person categories. In some works, these can flip midway through a work of prose, multiple narrators can appear, some narrators can see all while some can only see the surface of a character and not their thoughts (omniscient vs. omnipotent). Regardless, all fictional works have a point of view of some sort. And that's fact.