Shift to postmodernism

As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and British novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start, but the prefix 'post' is necessarily not a new era on its own account, but a reaction to, in this case, the literary traditions of the movement it refers to: modernism was imagined to have failed, not so much in art as regarding the events of the modern period: the Second World War with unseen disrespect of human rights (although just confirmed in the Geneva Convention in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment.) It also coincides with the beginning of the Cold War, the American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) and in the wake of decolonization the postcolonial literature. The beginning of postmodern literature is often marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first performance of Waiting for Godot in 1953 or the first publication of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture in 1966 or Ihab Hassan's coinage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in