Hang with me here, book lovers. This may go nowhere, but it seems worth noting. First, you have to understand that I'm a huge fan of David Foster Wallace and his epic and genre-defying novel, Infinite Jest (easily one of my top 5 books of all time). Even though I haven't read it in a while, I think about it often and follow conversation about it on the Wallace discussion list. Recently that list pointed to an interview with Wallace in which he said that he loves Wittgenstein because
 he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. And so he trashed everything he'd been lauded for in the "Tractatus" and wrote the" Investigations," which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that's why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a "private language"). 
One of the main subplots of Infinite Jest revolves around a character who goes by Gately and who ends up living in an addiction-recovery halfway house (Ennet House, I believe it's called, though it's been too long since I read the novel to be sure about all these details) and spending a lot of time at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. So Wallace is clearly concerned with both issues of solipsism and addiction/AA. That's why I immediately thought of him and IJ when I read this Chronicle of Higher Ed. article about AA, addiction, and academia, in which the anonymous author basically concludes that, like Wittgenstein's "Investigations," AA is basically an argument against solipsism:
It's true that AA addresses individual problems rather than the larger problem of addiction in culture. But the same could be said of any therapy or medical treatment. More than that, the standard leftist critique of "fetishizing the individual" over-simplifies AA's model of recovery. The paradox of AA is that while it focuses on the individual, it works only in the context of a relationship or a group dynamic, one drunk talking to another. And a social dimension is built into the 12th of the famous steps, which charges us to take action, to spread the word, and to keep an eye out for the next alcoholic. For me, that was the impetus to write this essay, and to "come out" to a student who is addicted and in trouble.
The similarity between DFW's comments about Wittgenstein to the above thoughts on AA lead me to conclude that Gately and the AA/addiction parts of IJ are at least to some degree arguments against solipsism and for community. AA becomes for Wallace a trope for language itself. Also, by extension, any argument against solipsism might also be an argument against the kind of poststructuralism/postmodernism that was circulating in literary communities when DFW was working on IJ. So while I've often heard IJ described as "pomo lit," I wonder if it's actually anti-pomo, which might only make it more seriously pomo in that it incorporates arguments against itself into itself. At any rate, it's interesting to think of AA as a sort of antidote to the fear that we've "lost our way" in the world, that we can't know anything, etc. This suggests an explanation for AA's late 20th century growth and mainstream acceptability, as well as the rise of addiction that makes AA necessary in the first place. Is addiction the ultimate expression of solipsism? 8:36:00 AM 
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