Fourteen English majors presented their Capstone projects May 3 at a poster display in Hill Hall. Subjects ranged from the poetry of Langston Hughes to how disabled characters are portrayed in modern fiction and memoirs.

David Greisman studied how Nathaniel Hawthorne coped with a troubled family history through his writing. Hawthorne’s forefathers included a judge at the Salem witch trials and a man who persecuted Quakers and blasphemers. These subjects all turned up in his writing. Even Hawthorne’s famous “Scarlet Letter” was in part based on his mother, who became pregnant before marrying – causing a scandal at the time.

“It was a frenetic but fulfilling task to put this together,” says Greisman. “It was a lot of work, as are most Capstones. But by the time I reached the end I realized it was the pinnacle of my time at McDaniel.”

English majors complete a paper on their subject as well as an oral presentation. This is the second year students are required to present posters of their work.

“The challenge is to boil down the text and convey what their paper is about,” says English Professor Kathy Mangan, who taught the spring semester senior seminar.

Amelie Shaffer analyzed the writing styles among male and female sports columnists. By examining articles about skater Michelle Kwan and champion racehorse Barbaro, Shaffer found differences in both the writers’ approach and diction.

“The male columnists criticized Kwan for being too focused on skating and not having a boyfriend,” Shaffer says. “The female columnists wrote more of a tribute to her skating.”

Men were harsher to their subjects than women, according to Shaffer, while women were more admiring.

In her project, “Sex in the City: Women as Economic and Cultural Products in the Urban American Novel,” Jen Harrington examined how female characters in three turn-of-the-century novels essentially “sold” themselves.

She read “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser, “The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton, and “Maggie, A Girl of the Streets” by Steven Crane. In all three novels, the women’s situations ended tragically.

“Women became a part of production and consumption, but it only ends in misery for the protagonists,” says Harrington. “They are a product of the society they live in.”

Seniors advised by Associate Professor Robert Katchur and Professor Pamela Regis presented their senior seminar papers and posters in the fall.

Here is a complete list of the English Capstones presented this spring:

Betsy Beveridge: “Raising the Curtain on Gender: Exploring Gender Theory in Performance Studies Through Two 20th Century American Plays”

Katie Bowen:  “From Symbol to Individual: The Evolution of the Disabled Character in Modern American Fiction”

Rob Goeke:  “Dig and be Dug in Return: Langston Hughes’ Blues and Jazz Poetry and the Encapsulation of African-American Life”

David P. Greisman:  “The Sardonic Letter: Why Nathaniel Hathorne Became Nathaniel Hawthorne, and How He Atoned for the Sins of His Forefathers”

Jen Harrington:  “Sex in the City: Women as Economic and Cultural Products in the Urban American Novel”

Katie Hood:  “The Fight for a Voice: A Formal and Rhetorical Analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s ‘The Solitude of Self’”

Laurel Kenney:  “Sexuality and the Self: Recognizing the Female Body in Self-Identification in the Poems of Millay, Bishop, and Lorde”

Julianne Lechman:  “Uneasy Dreams: Explicating the Silence in Stephen King’s ‘All That You Love Will be Carried Away’”

Nick McCourt:  “A Marxist Approach to Madness and Darkness in Edgar Allan Poe”

Beth McLane:  “Detective Thrillers and Serial Killers: The Grotesque and Analytic Methods in Works by Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Harris”

Troy Pfister:  “Human Binary 1010110101: An Analysis of the Mechanization of Humans through Science and Religion in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut”

Amalie Shaffer:  “Gender versus Genre: A Rhetorical Match-up between Female and Male Sports Columnists”

Jenna Swartz:  “Surpassing Skin Deep Definitions: Rethinking Female Beauty and Revising Female Self in Two Late 20th Century Memoirs”

Amanda Vincenzes:  “The ABC’s of Hawthorne’s Women—Alluring, Beautiful, Confined…Deadly: An Examination of the Threat of Female Sexuality in Four Works”