ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the question of representation, an issues encountered when working on my doctoral dissertation, which later revised and published under the title, 'Good Writing' in Cross-Cultural Context, and continued to wrestle with in another project. It suggests that, as we continue to pursue contrastive rhetoric, an enterprise that has yielded a great many insights into the cultural dynamics of ESL writing classes and will offer still more, we should not continue business as usual, but rather should engage in a rigorous examination of the philosophical and political underpinnings of our research methodology. On the philosophical front, the differences among the modes of research were delineated in equally stark dichotomous terms. Empirical research is the dominant mode of inquiry in ESL writing, and there is nothing wrong with that, but when one can peruse the entire archive of a journal and find precious few essays engaging in philosophical rumination, something is seriously missing.
