Literature and Society: A New Reading of Sembène Ousmane's Le Mandat.

Abstract: Literature is an essential platform for socio-political, cultural and economic struggles among other things. This creative art called literature is a source of dialogue, debate, exchange and innovation. A form of creativity which enhances transfer of culture and knowledge that are useful for coping with societal tasks In other words, it paints life with a view to share human experiences, feelings, imaginations, observations, findings, predictions and suggestions for prevailing social realities. However, as open and flexible literature is, practitioners; writers and critics alike are advised to desist from arbitrariness. We conceive literature as something more than art for art sake not because such stance is wrong but because literature has other potent roles to play in human society. In this paper, we attempt to decode Sembène Ousmane'sLe Mandat with a view to unmasking the representations of a society in literary work. In other words, we demonstrate the relationships between Literature and Society, using faction as our theoretical back-up. The paper concludes that literature is a functional weapon for social criticism which will bring about sustainable developments in various human societies.