Jennifer R. Goodman of Cambridge and Thomas M. Doerflinger of Allston will receive the 1980 Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essays in the English Language, the Bowdoin Committee announced today.

Goodman is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in English, and Doerflinger is a sixth-year history student.

The Bowdoin committee awards the prize each year to two graduate students submitting excellent English essays on any subject. Winners receive a bronze medal, a sheepskin certificate and $1500.

William Alfred, Kenan Professor of English and chairman of the committee, said yesterday members looked for essays that were authoritative, informative, original and "had a grace to their arrangement."

Goodman's essay, entitled "The Captain's Self-Portrait: John Smith as Chivalric Biographer," discussed the autobiographical writing of Captain John Smith in terms of the romance novels and popular fiction familiar to him, Goodman said yesterday.

Doerflinger's essay "Enterprise on the Delaware," dealt with "the discovery of resources when people don't think they have resources," Alfred said yesterday.

The approximately 30 entrants submitted essays under pseudonyms. "The winners were spotted by all of us as excellent papers," Costas D. Papaliolios, professor of Physics and one of the six faculty committee members who made the selection, said yesterday.

Andrew H. Delbanco '73 of Dunster House and Cambridge received an honorable mention for his historic essay, "Community: The Persistance of an American Ideal."

Previous Bowdoin prize winners include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger, former Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey '28, and Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University.